I remember falling in love with the square composition. Strictly speaking, it happened before I started shooting in square myself. At the time I was mostly shooting film, and I had brought some rolls to the lab for development that day. Pavel Kosenko, one of the lab founders, just came back from a trip to the far north, where he’d been trying his newly acquired (but old) Hasselblad, or “hassle-bla-bla-d”, as he calls it 🙂 As it happened, his film had just been scanned, and we looked at the results together on his laptop. After 35mm film, medium format looked absolutely stunning: sharp and with beautiful tonal transitions and all that. But what impressed me the most was a completely different way of seeing the scene. When your viewfinder itself is limited to a square, you start building the balance of the frame differently and it removes the choice between portrait and landscape orientation; adds one more creative constraint, which has always helped me forget about the camera and dissolve completely into the process. Later I bought a Hasselblad myself and, for several years, had a great time shooting with that clumsy camera. I eventually had to sell it, but the habit of shooting in square, as you can see, stayed with me.