Day 6: Photography--Framing

Today, Maren chose photography.

We looked at the photographs of Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange on our first day of JSWA.

Today we talked about how photographers often challenge themselves to 'frame' a photograph in accordance with the format of the 'film.' And I say 'film' in quotes because we don't actually use film anymore. Still, with a typical digital camera, the picture will be a specific proportion of heighth to width.

Sure, you can crop photographs--much more easily these days than in the days of film and enlargers--but part of the learning of any artist, no matter what media, is framing. Framing is the process of deciding what will be included within the frame of the finished artpiece.

Painters have the option of simply NOT painting things they don't want within their picture. If, in a landscape, a rock just gets in the way of a lovely tree the artist wants to paint, he can just leave the rock out.

A photographer doesn't quite have that kind of flexibility, because the camera records everything its eye (lens) sees.

So, the photographer has three options:
1. Physically remove unwanted objects or manipulate the subject of the photograph so unwanted objects don't appear in the frame;
2. Adjust the angle of the camera so unwanted objects don't appear in the photograph;
3. (A relatively new option for photographers) Photoshop, including cropping.

The last option makes things easy for today's photographers. And photographers using older methods can still crop photos during the printing process or afterward.

But today's lesson wasn't about cropping. Quite to the contrary. I wanted her to learn to compose a photograph that would NOT need cropping. She had to pay attention to all the elements that appeared within the camera's field of vision and either adjust her position or adjust the elements within the frame to compose the photograph.

Here are a couple in which she didn't pay much attention to composition and framing, or missed elements that she decided she didn't want in the frame:



Here are a couple of good ones in which she 'fixed' the problems with the previous attempts:



For younger children, this is a good day to introduce them to a camera, teach them about proper distance from the subject (most children think they need to be VERY close to the subject) and focusing.