Is the frame part of the photo?

[abufletcher]

First of all I'm not talking about the hunk of wood or steel around a picture. I

mean the "framing" of a composition. I also don't want to dredge up the old

debate about precise or imprecise framing with RF's or whether or not after

the fact cropping is OK. The topic is whether you consider framing to be an

integral aspect of the act of composing a photo (whether to do it in camera or

later).

 

My own personal preference has always been design my photos within the

confines of one of the standard frame ratio, primarily 3:2, 5:4 (vertical or

horizontal), and 1:1. I seem to have a very strong bias towards 3:2 horizontal

framing. It doesn't matter to me that these are randomly (historically) arrived

at stardards. I've just never felt comfortable lopping off parts of a picture until

I've created an individually perfect rectangle size for every photo. I suppose

this is tied to my view that the essential art of photography is extracting fixed

shape rectangles of visual matter from the world we live in -- a view which

might may well be mistaken and ready for an overhaul.

 

Are photographs that don't rely on the frame to as great a degree more

"subject/content driven?" Does INSISTING on the frame force the viewer to

deal with the photo more as an object in its own right rather than as a window

into the world?

[frdchang]

your asking "why is the sky blue"

 

someone will say something about how colors refract differently in the water vapor present in the atmosphere...

 

but that doesn't answer why the sky is blue...

 

then someone will say that the sky is blue because we see it as blue...

 

but that doesn't answer why the sky is blue...

 

but someone will say that within the infinitely numbered combinations of universe that exist and not exist, we exist at this very fine moment with all the perfect combination of natures constants to observe that indeed the sky is blue...

 

but that doesn't answer why the sky is blue..

 

the frame is a weird animal... sometimes its one thing one moment...and then its another...

[EricM]

the sky is blue because the clouds are crying.

[el_fang]

<i>"whether you consider framing to be an integral aspect of the act of composing a photo (whether to do it in camera or later)"</i>

<p>Absolutely, yes - it's the very core of photography imo. In this article:

<p><a href="http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/0410/excerpt2.html" target="_blank">What It Takes To Be A NG Photographer</a>

<p>Michael "Nick" Nichols says, "For me, it's not about travel, it's not about having fun - it's always been about a fascination with getting important things onto a rectangle."

[abufletcher]

I've been thinking about this a lot recently because a friend/fellow local

photographer and I are thinking of jointly doing up one of those "do-it-

yourself" (and "for-yourself") photography books sort of as a souvenir of our

time in Shikoku, Japan. He's done some nice layout work in connection with

the wedding work he does but the photos are cropped to fit the layout and use

techniques such as feathered edges, and photo inlayed in the "dead space"

of another photo. I really hate that! I don't think I could be comfortable

allowing my compositions to become fodder for a layout artist -- even if it were

me!

 

But that's just one consideration. I've also been showing my photos to some

students and they almost never comment on artistic or design elements but

rather on the objects depicted. The content. That is, they like the shot of the

takoyaki stand because they're hungry and they like takoyaki. Out of 20 or so

photos the following was selected as "the best" because: 1) "Cherry blossoms

are beautiful and the boy is very pretty."

 

Can framing effect the degree to which viewers see the photo as a whole vs.

the objects depicting within it? I'd just like to hear other people's perspectives

while I'm trying to explore some new ways of seeing.<div></div>

[richie chishty]

Donald:

 

I think your students are right about the photo of your son. "Cherry blossoms are beautiful and the boy is very pretty." Your son has a somewhat enigmatic expression in the photo. It is a nice portrait of him. The cherry blossoms are a bonus. You can infer all kinds of connections between the ephemeral blossoms and beauty, and the end of childhood innocence!

[abufletcher]

I think the frame plays a more important role in the following photo. You may

not care for this particular way of segmenting reality (i.e. the way I framed this

photo) but it is the frame that makes this photo the photo it is and not some

other photo.<div></div>

[abufletcher]

Fang, that's an interesting interview. But I notice he does say "a" rectangle

and also that the photo that accompanies the interview is not a 3:2 so it's a

crop. Again I have no basic objection to cropping as long as the resultant

crop is part of the photo and not just part of the layout. BTW, wildlife photos

seem to be among the photos that can more routinely be appreciated for "the

beasties they contain" rather than the packaging.

[abufletcher]

Just to lead us into the topic, here a "custom crop" of the BW above:<div></div>

[al_kaplan1]

The proportions of the photo can either be determined by the subject, in which case we either "frame" to fit the subject or crop after the fact, or we can work within the confines of the film format, and make "full frame" composition a fetish. This results in many square photos from Rollieflex and Hasselblad users, while folks with standard 35mm cameras compose in the 2:3 aspect ratio that was arrived at from pure happenstance when the standard 35mm movie frame of 18x24mm was doubled to 24x36mm for still camera use in the first Leica.

 

Go back a bit in photo history, to the era of "press cameras", and 4x5 inch film ruled on the U.S. side of the Atlantic. The British liked "quarter plate" which was 3.25x4.25 inches, and on the continent 9x12cm reigned. Because sheet film is actually cut slightly undersize, and the edges are held by grooves in the film holder, the image area of press cameras is probably 3/8 inch less in both directions. That makes determining actual aspect ration a bit antsy, but still it falls about in the middle between the square 120 format and the elongated 35mm frame.

 

Paper sizes in the U.S. started out based on film sizes since contact prints were around before enlargers. When newspapers shot mostly 4x5 THE standard print size was 8x10. As Rolleiflexes and the like became common the news guys cropped. Then by the mid 70's 4x5's were as rare as hen's teeth and 35mm had pretty much taken over the field. When the Hunt brothers drove silver prices through the stratosphere a couple years later suddenly 5x7 paper, at a bit less than half the cost of 8x10, started to appeal to corporate number crunchers. The bonus was that 5x7 was very close to the same 2:3 aspect ratio of the standard 35mm frame. It was no longer important to guestimate the 8x10 crop in your viewfinder!

 

But another reality strikes home here: We produce images, but editors and art directors produce the finished procuct. The same photo might go out to many end users, each with different layout concerns that day. It depends on how much copy it goes with, what ad sales are that day, any number of factors. The corporate number crunchers don't like to see unutilized white space. In many cases, in order to assure that your photo gets used at all, you're best off framing rather loosely so it can be cropped later to fit the available space.

 

Yup, I prefer shooting full frame, sometimes with a black line from the filed out carrier, but even for personal work the proportions might not always be ideal for a given image. Do what works best for that photograph.

[abufletcher]

I think news photos are another genre that are much more subject driven and

therefore much more easily cropped after the fact. The whole point of news

photos is to show people an objective reality (or at least one side of it). It is

typically the "event" that matters not the framing. Capa's photos are first and

foremost about what was going on and only secondarily and only in certain

example about photographic composition. The photos were great because

they were made by a guy willing to always be in the right place at the right

time. Or maybe the wrong place and the right time. The essense of the dying

Spanish soldier shot has nothing to do with framing -- it was about capturing a

moment.

 

I think this is what I mean about some photos being more subject-driven and

that the frame isn't as important. In HCB photos on the other hand, you can't

really change the frame without destroying the photo.

[aricmayer]

If you consider that Barnack designed the 35mm frame to be the closest aspect ratio to the

Golden Mean that we have in photography, then the frame is very important. The Golden

Mean has been known since the ancient Greeks to be one of the most mathematically

interesting and aesthetically perfect shapes, next to the square and the circle. If one

appreciates that sort of thing, the frame then does have something to offer and should be

considered as part of the composition.

[dan flanders]

It's doubtful that Barnack had the Golden Mean in mind when he devised the Leica and its format. He merely doubled the frame of the dominant 35mm cine frame which was also derived by happenstance. 1:1.5 is a long way from 1:1.617**, and just because you cram your subjects into a particular frame does not make the composition conform to the Golden Mean. It just ain't that simple!

[james_elwing]

5x4 was closer to the golden mean, as was the 18x24 movie frame. Lots of people have thought 3x2, 35mm still proportion too wide for their taste.

[abufletcher]

The way I see it, it doesn't matter in the slightest what the various standard frame ratios are or how they came to be that way. It 7:3 were the standard I'd probably be using that.

 

The question is, and this is the real heart of this thread, just how important is the frame -- ANY FRAME -- to the design of a photograph?

 

It seems to me, that some photograhers seem to consider the frame no more than a convenient "package" for the delivering the content. These photographers are typically more comfortable doing various sorts of "convenience crop", for example cropping a photo so it fits in a standard 8 x 10 frame or clipping out elements for use in a layout.

 

Other photographers seem to feel that the frame is an essential part of the content of the photo. For them, this is not separating the framing from the content. The content IS the framing.

 

Again it doesn't matter a wit, which shape frame we're talking about here. long and thin or tall and fat you still have to make this decision about the role the frame will play.

[wind.dk]

"5x4 was closer to the golden mean, as was the 18x24 movie frame. Lots of people have thought 3x2, 35mm still proportion too wide for their taste" - now that's a new way of interpreting "closer to".

 

The golden mean is approximately 1.618, 3x2 is 1.5 (0.118 difference), 5x4 is 1.25 (0.368 difference) and 24x18 is approximately 1.33 (0.288 difference), so the standard 36x24 of 35mm film is the closest to the golden section we have in normal still image formats. Adding an extra sprocket hole (making it nine) would have got us 1.6875 with a difference of 0.0695, so if he really went for the golden mean, we'd have had an even wider format today.

 

Of course it doesn't matter a hoot in this discussion, but I just thought I'd put it right. Regardless of the dimensions however, framing is such an integral part of photography, it's weird to discuss it's importance. Imagine a photograph without framing - yeah well, it doesn't really exist, so without a frame, there's no picture.

 

But then what about the exact framing for the subject?

 

In most "fine art" photography it's obviously important, but in other categories it's often far more important than people are aware. Your students who say the cherry blossoms are beautiful and the boy is pretty, would they still say that if the image was framed differently? How about a closer crop - the cherry blossoms would be less dominant, maybe to insignificance. A wider crop - the boy would be too tiny to be recognizable. An off center composition - it might not fit the calm simplicity of the subject. Just because people don't say "this picture is good because of this and that and because it is framed just so" it doesn't mean they're not (maybe subconsciously) affected by the framing.

 

I don't know if the people in question are studying photography or visual arts, but if they're not, it's just the same as when I say I like Beethoven, I can't tell you why I think his 5th Symphony is great, because technically I can't tell it apart from the random cacophony of an orchestra tuning. Or why it's such a joy to read a book by Murakami, it's just a story...

 

In news photography the headline is usually the most important thing for people's perception of the image, with the caption coming second. Many prize winning news photos would never have been noticed if they were not connected with something important, because they could not stand on their own. But even so, the ones you remember I think are mostly the ones where the subject is not only interesting but the composition well-made too, whether by design or by chance. Also what you include or exclude in the photograph beyond the main subject can be significant.

 

So maybe it's not a matter of the photo as an object rather than a window on the world, but the photo as an object making you notice the world, whether it's the beauty of the cherry blossoms, the ugliness of war or whatever else can fit in a frame.