Owning the Frame

I didn’t realize that Vincent Versace had started some real blogging at the Acme Educational Site. I think it’s a great idea because his ideas are very densely presented in “Welcome to Oz”. And I think that there’s lots of capture related thinking that isn’t really developed there.

As I’ve been shooting, I’ve had this thought from Vincent intruding on my process: “Own the Frame”. For as long as I’ve photographed, I’ve avoided cropping unless absolutely necessary. I try to have the discipline to compose in the viewfinder. When it looks like a picture, I trip the shutter.

But try this on for size:

VIncent Versace: “The problem is that we operate under a belief that one actually composes a photograph. Unless you are in a studio doing a still life, where you can move the objects in your image around, you don%u2019t compose a photograph, you frame it. That%u2019s a big difference in how you conceptualize your images. “

For the last year or two I’ve been afraid of capturing images like the one on this page. These formal compositions is where I started and remain a comfort zone for me. However I now have a better context for them as details of the suburban landscape. Yellow curb paint is definitely a color of suburbia. And we may not have jewel like mountains, but we have lots of jewel like asphalt.