It’s easy to forget sometimes that you don’t have go very far to find strange and wonderful scenes for your camera. And it’s easy to become so accustomed to objects that you encounter regularly that you cease to really see them, until a maniacal sunbeam comes in from some obscure angle.
Translucent objects begin to glow; reflective objects project alien landscapes across familiar surfaces.
Everything becomes a mystery, if not two or three…
It isn’t easy for me to compose with the full frame. There are a lot of reasons for this. Some are basically ineluctable. My cameras don’t have 100% viewfinder coverage, and I wear glasses, meaning that it’s sometimes hard for me to see the entire viewfinder at once in the first place. I also shoot a lot of birds, and it’s very hard to fill a whole frame with a bird unless the bird is domesticated, taxidermied, or drugged. And when it comes to the black and white shooting I did for my class, I ran into trouble when I did fill the frame, because I was printing 35mm frames on 8×10 paper.
But some of my problems with full-frame composition have to do more with how I think and see than the physical and technological constraints placed on me by my body and my materials. I usually shoot handheld in a rapid-fire fashion, so that I can keep moving, avoid attracting attention from potential muggers, and maintain my flow-stateish condition of just seeing and shooting. Because of this, I’ve developed a habit of shooting to fill a comparatively small portion of the frame and then cropping rather severely in post-processing. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this — I’m not sympathetic to the anti-cropping purists — but it does create possible issues of resolution.
This image was a case in which I could tell immediately that it was important that I determine my composition ahead of time. There are many compositional elements, and the whole ensemble was required for the image to work. It was critical that I include everything in the frame, and because of the peculiar shape of the overall composition, and the physical dimensions involved, it was also critical that I make sure everything was already in its place at the moment of capture.
So, I took some extra time, even though it meant briefly obstructing this driveway. I’m glad I did, too, because the first several versions of this shot — taken from a whole different angle — were basically unusable. In fact, it was only after I lost my game of chicken with one of the cars trying to use the driveway that this angle occurred to me. : )