Photography transcript 10 — Framing in Photography — Photography.ca

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast hosted by Marko Kulik
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This is an audio tran­scrip­tion — Spelling, punc­tu­a­tion and gram­mer may not be perfect‚

Hi there every­one and wel­come to the Pho­tog­ra­phy Pod­cast on Photography.ca.‚ My name is Marko.‚ We are com­ing to you from Mon­treal, Que­bec, Canada, and today is Jan­u­ary 26, 2007.‚ For today’s show, we are going to talk a lit­tle bit about com­po­si­tion and we are going to talk a lit­tle bit about fram­ing in par­tic­u­lar.
Now, what fram­ing is, it is a clas­sic tech­nique whereby you would use a frame to frame a photo.‚ You have often seen this.‚ You will see like a child look­ing through a win­dow and you will see the whole exte­rior of the win­dow with the child look­ing out of it.‚ The win­dow itself makes for a very inter­est­ing com­po­si­tional ele­ment and a lot of these shots work and add inter­est to your pho­tog­ra­phy.‚‚ Frames can be very pow­er­ful and you can use dif­fer­ent objects that will act as frames dur­ing the shoot.‚ You can use branches, you can use an arch­way, you can use a door­way.‚ You could sneak behind some bushes and from the left and from the right just kind of make the branches act as a frame then look at some­thing dif­fer­ent like a flower or a moun­tain or a dog or a per­son from beyond.‚ That will add quite a lot of inter­est to your shot.‚ The branches will act as a frame and make the sub­ject pop.
A tech­nique that has been tried time and time again is just actu­ally using an old frame.‚ You take one of these old wooden frames, you pop the pic­ture out, you have some­one smile behind the frame, and you take the shot get­ting the frame in the shot and the per­son in the frame, the actual pic­ture frame, and that makes for an inter­est­ing shot as well.‚ You can do it with babies, women, old peo­ple, young peo­ple, any­one, and it always adds inter­est to the shot.
Now, some­thing else that you could try is selec­tive focus when you are using fram­ing as well, espe­cially if what you are shoot­ing is far from the frame itself, you can have some inter­est­ing effects with selec­tive focus.‚ Let us say, you are actu­ally shoot­ing through a win­dow.‚ I do not know, you are in some­one else’s base­ment, you open up the win­dow, and you see some­thing inter­est­ing in the dis­tance.‚ You back away just a lit­tle bit, you take a pic­ture of the out­side of the win­dow for the fram­ing effect, and then you also have what you are look­ing at in the dis­tance.‚ If you are focus­ing on the win­dow itself, what is going to be in the dis­tance is prob­a­bly going to be less sharp depend­ing on what aper­ture you use.‚ If you are look­ing for a selec­tive focus effect, I rec­om­mend obvi­ously a larger aper­ture, which will make what is in the dis­tance some­what blurry or less sharp.‚ You can have a really inter­est­ing effect.‚ Let us say it is a flower, or a boy, or a dog, or any­thing actu­ally, you will get the sub­tle form of what is in the dis­tance while hav­ing the actual win­dow itself act­ing as a frame in sharp focus.
On the oppo­site end of it, you can, of course, focus on what is in the dis­tance and keep the frame blurry or less sharp.‚ Again, it would depend on what aper­ture you would use, but use a larger aper­ture and you can play with the dis­tances.‚ If you use too small an aper­ture, f/16, f/22, f/32, then more of the fore­ground and the back­ground will appear to be sharp and you will have less of a selec­tive focus effect.
For one of my shots that I put up on the blog, you should have prob­a­bly seen it by now; if not, just go to Photography.ca/blog.‚ For one of the shots I did for this exper­i­men­tal pod­cast, I basi­cally took a purse and used the han­dles of the purse act­ing as a frame.‚ I set the purse up on a table and put a cou­ple of books under­neath the purse.‚ I backed up and then I had a model hang out maybe about three or four or five feet from behind that purse.‚ I focused both on the han­dle of the purse and got some inter­est­ing effects there and kept the model blurry in the back­ground.‚ Of course, I did the oppo­site as well.‚ I would have shot in sharp focus the model through the han­dles of the purse and the effects are pretty inter­est­ing actu­ally.‚ I hope you liked them.
You can really get some good effects by doing sim­i­lar things.‚ You can use what­ever you want to act as a frame.‚ You could take the door­knob off an old door and shoot through the door­knob.‚ You could open up the door just a crack and shoot through the crack.‚ Focus on the crack or focus on what is in the dis­tance and you are going to have some very inter­est­ing com­po­si­tional shots.‚ These are more artsy.‚ They are more artsy-fartsy.‚ They are more fun.‚ They are more inter­est­ing.‚ They add expe­ri­ence.‚ They have another dimen­sion to the shot.‚ Of course, I highly rec­om­mend, as always, just try­ing out dif­fer­ent things.‚ If it does not work, it does not work.‚ You could take a chair, shoot through the back of a chair, shoot through the back of a model.‚ The frame does not even have to be a full frame.‚ The frame can be like the let­ter “L.”‚ Take a model or any per­son and just have them look out toward the sun­set, out by yon­der, and then use the side of their head and shoul­ders to act as a frame and have some­thing in the dis­tance.‚ Try mak­ing what is in the dis­tance sharp and then try mak­ing their head and shoul­der sharp.‚ It is all about an inter­est­ing shot and the more you play, the more likely you are to get that inter­est­ing shot.
The theme for this learn­ing show as well as the other ones where we give some instruc­tion is to exper­i­ment.‚ Do not be afraid, just try it, espe­cially if you got a dig­i­tal cam­era.‚ Try it.‚ If it does not work, erase the shot.
I very much do hope you will pro­vide some feed­back for the shots we have up and as well on the con­tent of the pod­cast.‚ You can do so through the blog directly, Photography.ca/blog, or you can do it through the bul­letin board as well, Photography.ca, just make your way to the bul­letin board and pro­vide some com­ments.‚ This was our 10th pod­cast and we are please to have made it to 10 and we hope to get to a hun­dred in a cou­ple of years.‚ Hope­fully, we will keep on this sched­ule, one a week and we will get there sooner rather than later.‚ I guess it still makes it about two years, but it is a good start.‚ Ten is solid and I am happy about 10.‚ This pod­cast will end up being our short­est pod­cast since we started at about seven min­utes or so, but we hope you are okay with that, feel­ing that good things came in the small pack­age.‚ Our next pod­cast will be an inter­view pod­cast, so of course it will be a bit longer.‚ We hope you enjoy the mix that we are pro­vid­ing you.
Thanks very much for lis­ten­ing, every­one.‚ Keep on shoot­ing, keep on tak­ing those cre­ative shots and we will see you all again in about one week.‚ Bye for now.
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