I’ve recently discovered that it’s often better to frame your shot beyond the intended scene or subject. My reasoning for this is that when you include additional scenery in a shot, you have more information in the frame, and this provides more options when it comes to tuning the final product.
As an example, just by cropping a scene creatively, it’s easy to create more interest or to change the way a shot feels by biasing objects toward a particular area of the frame. This can help to draw the eye away from the centre, or at least toward a point of interest. Having the additional information in a frame can also help you clean up some human error that may be evident once your film has been developed.
The following photo will be used as my example in this post. I took this shot at a place called the “V-Wall” at Nambucca Heads on the north coast of NSW, Australia. It’s quite an interesting place. A break wall, a couple of hundred metres long, where various tourists have all left their mark over the past 15 years or so by painting the concrete and stones that have been used to make up the breakwater.
Here’s the original shot – you’ll notice right off the mark that it’s not horizontal, and there’s quite a lot of sky. The following edits aren’t necessarily nice, I’m simply using them to demonstrate a point.
The first thing I will do here is straighten the frame up. I’ve used photoshop to do this for the purposes of this post, but a print could easily be cropped at the correct angle with a guillotine to achieve the same result. This can also be corrected in the darkroom if you’re developing your own prints. I’ll also use this opportunity to cut down the amount of sky visible.
In the next edit, you’ll see that I’ve taken almost all of the sky out of the frame and I’ve remove some of the right-hand side. Did you notice that your eye was drawn up the path toward the people at the end?
This time, I’ve cropped the top right out of the shot, and the people too. This edit draws my attention to the very middle of the path.
And finally, by cropping the right-hand side out of the frame, The large boulders that make up the break wall are now the focus of the shot. I feel compelled to try an read them…
So, in short, my point is this: Always think about including more in your shots than just the subject. You’ll often find that by adjusting visible parts of the shot in post-editing and using some of the additional information, you can make your finished product more intriguing to the viewer.
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