Subject's size in the frameThere use to be an old adage in photography which said: If your images are not good enough, you are not close enough. The idea was to fill the frame. To a large extent, I still agree with this adage. Where I diverge from it is what to fill the frame with. If I take an image of a bird and I fill the frame with only the bird I may have a very good image. If I looked at that image in isolation I would be very happy with it. But, would I still be so excited if I had a hundred such images. They can become repetitive and dare I say, boring as a group of images. They don't tell a story. So I ask myself, is it always necessary to fill the frame with just the bird? Do images work where the bird is a small part of the image? Can we use the rest of the frame space to tell the story of the bird?
Here is an example. This Kingfisher is small-ish in the frame. Yet the image works for me because of two reasons. Firstly, the perch makes up for the small size of the bird. The perch is telling a story. It is dry. The leaves are busy drying out and dying. The second reason is the background, for it is telling the same story as the perch. There is no water here, it is dry. The background does not have much green in it. This is not what you will typically find on a river bank or besides a pond. The Kingfisher is fishing for insects instead of fish. The Kingfisher seems out of place here. But that is precisely what is making the viewer wonder and ask questions. That means that they are engaging with the image. Imagine this same image where the bird filled the frame. Almost all of the leaves and the expansive background would be lost. Would that image ask questions and make one wonder what is going on? I think that there is a place for images like this to break the monotony of frame filled images and to tell a little bit of a story. Comments
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