Exercise: Fitting the Frame to the Subject (pg 25)

Brief: Take four different photographs. The first photograph should be a simple shot of the subject with not much consideration of composition. For the second shot have the subject fill the frame right to the edges. The third shot should show no edges of the subject and should be something of interest within the frame and finally the fourth shot should be a wider shot of the subject and its surroundings. Choose the image you like best and describe why.

For this exercise I took a short drive to St. Mary’s Church in my town and initially I was going to use the church as the subject. While there though I happened across a small burial vault that I personally thought was more interesting – hence the photos that follow.

The first photo should be a quick shot of the subject with not much consideration to the framing or composition. While this goes against everything I try and do with my camera and I actually found it hard to ‘detune’ myself to simply lift the camera and take the photo, this is what I got (taken from the angle I approached burial vault).

Photo 1

The second photo reframes the subject so that it completely fills the frame from edge to edge. Doing this makes the entire vault the subject. There’s no focus of any specific detail and so the viewer is not given guidance as to what to pay interest in, but instead encouraged to explore the wider aspects of the subject. If one uses an image framed this way then one is likely to just want to convey a general view of a given subject. These kind of images are useful in reportage and stock photography where it will be used to reinforce a story line.

Photo 2

The third image is framed in such a way that the viewer cannot see any edges of the subject. This results in focusing attention on something that the photographer wished to make obvious or raise as something of interest. It’s not always certain that the viewer will know what the entire subject is although I think in most cases this will want to be fairly obvious. The exception is perhaps when shooting macro or abstract images where it’s sometimes part of the ‘fun’ of the image to have the viewer work out what it is they are looking at.

In this case I was drawing attention to the persons interred within this vault. It’s obviously a family vault and it’s interesting to see the names of the dead, their ages, when they died and perhaps ponder a bit about them. Something I found interesting about this vault is that at least half of the sides available for additional names are blank. I wonder if they created a vault of this size with an expectation that more would be buried within it. Did the family generations down the line not have the funds to be interred in this way, or perhaps they had different views on how and where they should be buried. Maybe some of them were killed in action in another country in one of the many wars that took place around that time? We’ll never know of course.

Photo 3

The final image is framed in a way that it gives context to where the vault exists. This kind of framing is useful when you want to show how a subject fits in with its surroundings – its world. It’s also useful at times for demonstrating a sense of scale.

Photo 4

So that’s it. The end of this exercise except to say that my favourite from this sequence is ‘photo 3’ primarily because of the questions it raises in my own mind.  My least favourite is ‘photo 4’ because that car turned up literally two minutes before I took the photo – gah!