Mastering Photographic Composition, Creativity, and Personal Style by Alain Briot

Author:Alain Briot [Alain Briot]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: PHOTOGRAPHY / General
ISBN: 9781457100697
Publisher: Rocky Nook
Published: 2010-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 7-14. Navajoland Cloudscape

Example 6—Careful Cropping Between Objects: Navajoland Cloudscape

A photograph is by definition a section of reality. I use the word “section” intentionally. It sounds harsh but it accurately describes what a photograph does.

Regardless of how wide our lenses might be, we cannot photograph the entire scene in front of us. Certainly, we can create circular panoramas that capture a 360 degree view of a scene as it unfolds all around us, but to see such a view we would have to look at it one section at a time. We could not see it all at once. Furthermore, it would be difficult to display such a photograph in your home. It would have to wrap around the room in order to be displayed! This is why rectangular format photographs are the norm, and why paintings follow the same approach. These formats allow us to see the entire artwork at once, without having to turn our heads right and left. Panoramic photographs can work as well, as long as the format is not made to be overly long, unlike the example I just mentioned.

What does all this mean to you, the photographer? It means that you have to decide where to crop your photographs, where to end them, because you cannot photograph the entire scene or the entire world. Therefore, where to end the image, where to section the landscape, becomes an important decision. This decision will affect the contents of the entire image as well as the visual impression this image will give to the viewer.

Deciding where to end an image is never easy. However, it is particularly difficult when you photograph a cloudscape—a scene in which clouds are the dominant feature. Clouds are by nature fluffy and apparently endless. Therefore, we have to put an end to them arbitrarily for the purpose of the image. Where to crop the clouds, where to end the cloudscape, is a crucial decision. My guiding principle when doing so, my rule if you will, is to crop between the clouds. In other words, I do not crop the clouds themselves. Instead, I crop between the clouds. Or, I cut the photograph in front of or behind a cloud.

This is what I did in the image, Figure 7-14. Looking at the left side of the image, I cropped the photograph to the left of the cloud that is at the top of the image. I left a little bit of blue sky to the left of the cloud to give it space to travel to, metaphorically speaking. When you leave empty space next to a moving object, this empty space indicates the direction in which the object is traveling. Since a photograph is static and since what it shows is frozen in time, this space is metaphorically representative of motion. This empty space stands for something, and this something is the movement of the cloud, the journey that the cloud is taking through the sky, and the destination where it will be in a few moments.

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