Photography Article Composition: Fill the Frame|Photography Artist Statement

The concept of "Fill the Frame" is the third composition topic this month for the Boost Your Photography: 52 Weeks Challenge. (Join the Google+ Community to share your weekly photographs and receive feedback.) The previous topics this month were the Rule of Thirds and Leading Lines.

What is the Frame and Why Fill It?

Here, the frame refers to the edges of your photograph or the edges of the viewfinder of your camera when you are shooting. The advice to fill the frame means to get in close, to make your subject a significant portion of the final photograph.

This advice is articulated in quite a few unique ways, most recently in the admonishment to beginning photographers to "Get close. Then get nearer." (This specific wording featured 1/3 inside the current article The Most Valuable Photography Tips Ever on Digital Photography School. Check it out for some different excellent composition and images advice.) As Valerie explains, "Photographers have a tendency to depart too much ?Stuff? Around their situation. The viewer gets misplaced in the chaos and doesn?T understand in which to look. Less is regularly extra."

Fill the body encourages you, as a photographer, to actually spend some time thinking about your issue and the way excellent to function that difficulty for your image. How can you carry forward the details or the patterns or the most important detail(s) of your concern? How does the background add to or remove from the tale that you are attempting to tell?

Once you believe you studied you can answer the ones questions, compose and take your photograph. Then get closer, whether by means of zooming in your lens or transferring your self bodily closer with your toes. Take another image. Compare the 2 and spot whether filling the frame made a distinction for your composition in that scenario.

A right tip for whether you've got stuffed the body - does your situation spill out of the frame and past the boundaries of your image? If so, then you definitely are sincerely starting to fill the frame.

Fill the Frame: examples

The following collection of shots walks you through the process of identifying a subject and then continuing to explore that subject photographically while trying to consider filling the frame.

My initial impulse after encountering this superb field of sunflowers became to get the wide perspective shot above. This photograph establishes the context of the difficulty - the farm house, the dimensions of the field, and the darkening clouds in the sky. The sunflowers themselves, but, are best a small portion of the entire photo. Now to think about filling the body.

I decided to narrow my composition all the way down to a cluster of sunflowers, and I selected to zoom with my ft as well as with my lens. I moved in toward the sunflowers and were given down decrease, to higher emphasize their height. This lower shooting position also helped simplify the composition and emphasised the comparison among the brilliant hues of the sunflowers and the darker hues of the clouds. (This follows every other of my favorite portions of images recommendation - Remember the Background and Move Your Feet.)

But I could nevertheless get nearer. Next I narrowed the composition even in addition to a single sunflower. Here I used the off-middle placement favored by the Rule of Thirds to feature the flower and the bee I had discovered busily crawling around interior. I used an extended focal period on my zoom lens (round 220 mm in this case) and a wider aperture to isolate the flower from the historical past and to render the historical past sunflowers as bokeh blur. (Read greater about What a Wide Aperture Can Do for You.)

Yet there has been still towards go. Now my zoom lens become racked out to its farthest focal period (270 mm), and the middle of the sunflower so crammed the frame of my viewfinder that it spilled off out of the body on two facets. My problem was not 'discipline of sunflowers' or 'organization of sunflowers' or even 'sunflower.' It had become bee and sunflower and sample and coloration and extra.

Summary: Fill the Frame

Now, I am not saying that "Fill the Frame" is advice that makes sense in every photographic situation. That last photograph might not have even been your personal favorite of the series. But what matters is the process of photographic exploration and a willingness to experiment with composition. There are many, many situations where you can improve your photograph by getting closer, by moving in, and by filling the frame. By keeping that possibility in the back of your mind when shooting, you may find yourself making and capturing photographs you might not have taken before. And you may be impressed by what you find! (Consider joining the BYP 52 Weeks Google+ Community to share your weekly photograph and see what others are capturing.)