Understanding Borders and Frames

As a generalization, the camera captures an image in a rectangular shape and most digital sensors are rectangular or square. However, a print or reproduction of a photograph—while often rectilinear—is sometimes manipulated into a variety of shapes.

Most often, the rectangular shape that was captured by the camera becomes the rectangular frame bounding the image both in its native capture and in a reproduction or print rendering.

When making a photograph, the precise geometric relationship of the camera’s focal plane to the subject matter of your photo is not fixed until the shutter is released. The way you decide to establish this visual relationship has important consequences (see “Moving the Camera Slightly Makes a Big Difference” on page 61).

A study of rectangles starts with acknowledging the crucial, but often understated, role of “framing.” What do I mean by framing? Framing is a word that can mean many things, and the concept causes considerable confusion, so it is important to proceed with clarity.

In this spirit, yes, a picture frame—like the one that sits around a print on the wall—is indeed a frame. But a picture frame made of wood or metal is not what we are talking about here in the context of a photographic image.

A real-world picture frame is a frame only in the most literal sense, although some art does play with the motif of the external frame, perhaps by incorporating it into the image.

The most important part of framing in relationship to photographic composition concerns the boundaries of your image within and surrounding the image itself and does not involve the external picture frame.

All images have compositional boundaries, starting with the perimeter dimensions of the photo. In the case of a print on paper, this compositional boundary is expressed by the edge of the piece of paper, as well as the edges of the photo. In addition, most compositions of any complexity also have a variety of internal borders, boundaries, and frames.

The single most significant frame is that of the image itself. You don’t need to print an image to see this frame. It is perfectly apparent when you look at an image on a monitor or the internet.

One challenge taken on by Composition & Photography is to position photography in relationship to two-dimensional design. Looking at photography from the perspective of two-dimensional design, essentially all photographs must interact in their composition with their own edges.

Let me re-emphasize that the word “frame” can mean a number of different things, including:

• The monitor on which you look at an image.
• The paper border of a print.
• The boundary and edges of the photo itself.

All of these are frames, with the boundaries and edges of the photo being the most universal and useful. Let’s start by looking at how your internal composition can interact well with this photographic frame.

Controversy about Proportions

In 1726, Jonathan Swift published his satire Gulliver’s Travels. In this book, the surgeon Lemuel Gulliver traveled to a variety of exotic lands, including Lilliput where the inhabitants were engaged in endless war over which end of an egg was the best to open, the big end or the little end. All this is by way of saying that folks will argue and fight fervently about almost anything.

So it may not surprise you to learn that there is an active and ongoing controversy about cropping proportions of a photograph. “Originalists” maintain that all crops must be in the same proportions as was captured in the camera. On the other hand, hard-core “visualists” just want what serves the image best, and are less concerned about the “authenticity” of any crop.

Well, this is a pretty silly thing to get agitated about. Let me be clear that my sympathies generally fall with the visualists: I want what is best for the image.

However, the originalists do also have a point. If you are someone who views a lot of photographs—as most folk do in our society—or who works with photography, your compositional eye will have become accustomed to certain proportions, such as 1.5:1. Most post-production software specifically allows you to crop in the original proportions. There’s a kind of internal alarm bell that rings when a photograph is presented outside of these original proportions.

You can almost always get away with a square crop, and an original-proportion crop is, of course, expected. But any other crop may tend to make the viewer think consciously or unconsciously that something is awry.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t crop out of proportion. Sometimes an unusual crop is fully warranted. What you should know is that an out-of-proportion or non-square crop will often draw a second glance—for better or for worse.

Busting Into and Out of the Frame

So the frame’s the thing. It will be with every photo. But personally, I always get antsy when there are constraints on creative freedom. The frame is a constraint on my creative freedom and I don’t like it one bit!

So what are you going to do when the two-dimensional design constraints take a bite out of your personal creative freedom? You can ignore the situation and go on making great images in a conventional frame. As they say, “where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.”

That’s fine. But, why be conventional? If you have to have a frame, and you’re feeling antsy, you can either move toward the frame or move away from the frame. “Moving toward the frame” (busting into the frame) means intentionally adding your own frames to photographs in a potentially highly artificial way.

“Busting out of the frame” means placing your image in a context that is not usually thought of as a frame: circles, ovals, spirals, diamonds, having the image ooze out of the rectangle of its frame, adding protrusions to the frame, and so on.

In some cases, such as with journalistic photography, photographers intentionally frame an image so that important parts of the subject are cut off by the frame. This can be used to show busyness, confusion, movement at top speed, or incompleteness. Cutting off a body part or other important element can be a visual indication that something is wrong in the scene. The world is a messy place and using the frame in this way can show it.

There are no rules! Just as what we think of as a “circle” can actually be ovoid or elliptical, a “rectangle” isn’t necessarily a precise and rigid figure with right angles. The concept here is of a generally rectilinear space, but the corners can have some curves, and the lines can have character and be a bit wavy.

Here, we’re not looking for the precision of a geometrician. The key issue when it comes to framing is the relationship of a closed internal space with the outer boundaries of the image. Look for the overall sense and feeling that the shapes and their relationships within the frame convey to the viewer.

Tondos and Circles

An uncommon framing shape that you occasionally see is the circle, or as it is called in the painting world, the tondo.

There are several approaches to creating a tondo photographically. One is to use a circular fisheye lens (like the image of Mosta Dome shown on page 24 and the photo opposite).

Another approach is to construct a round image that is tondo-shaped on a solid background, usually bright white, as in a light box, or black. A third way to create a circular image is to use a selection and mask in Photoshop.

When creating a circular image optically, the name of the game is distortion. Whether you like it or not, your image will show distortion and curvature at the edges. The photo shown on page 60 is a good example of a fisheye—in this case horizontal rather than circular—where the center of the image has almost no distortion, but there is a great deal of bending at the edges.

Effective fisheye images embrace this distortion. They also acknowledge the height and inherent depth of field in an extreme wide-angle lens, and balance this compositionally using near-foreground elements as well as more distant subject matter.

Whether the round image is generated with the lens, as a construction, or in Photoshop, the circularity of a round image calls attention to its framing and to the borders of the image.

This means that compositionally it’s important to create structural bridges between the circular inner image and its frame. For example, the blue flowers at the edges of the tondos shown on pages 72–73 touch the round edges.

This kind of structural bridge serves as a visual path to bring the viewer into the core of the image. Without the connection between the outer and inner portions of a round image, a tondo appears disconnected in space and will struggle to supply emotional meaning.

The Humble but Mighty Triangle

A tripod holds your camera up and the tripod is humble but mighty. From an engineering viewpoint, the tripod and structures made from tripods provide great tensile strength.

But where’s the tripod when it comes to photographic composition?

Pretty much absent except as part of a rectangular composition, and in architectural photography. Maybe we should do something about this—start a trend!

If you want to join the CTU (Club of Triangle Users), consider that a triangle has three sides and three points. Each side and point must relate to and anchor with the surrounding rectangular framing. The only exception to this is when the triangular shape itself has been cut out, as in the image shown on this page.

Let’s emphasize: explicit triangles are fairly rare in compositions. Triangles can be powerful in photos and convey a sense of muscular compositional strength. Within a rectangular framing, triangles need to be clearly anchored at their vertices to the framework of the photo.

Working with Internal Rectangles

An image with internal rectangles is essentially presenting a frame within a frame. This may sound simple, but there is actually no end to the possibilities and complications of internal framing created with rectangles inside an image.

When the internal frames in an image are one after the other in a receding progression—as in Endless Doors on page 15 or Train Bridge, Maine shown opposite—this creates a unique sense of order as well as a visual approach to the infinite. For more about patterns and progressions, see pages 82–107.

Alternatively, an internal frame can represent a simple shape such as a window or a door, as shown in Golden Gate Window on page 78, or even a reflection in a puddle, as in Framed on page 79.

As you can see, one of the most common and effective motifs in photographic composition is the frame-within-a-frame, whether the inner frame is a literal window, a door, a reflection in a puddle, or sticks in a forest on the edge of a marsh.

The point is that internal framing creates a connection between the viewers’ world outside the image and the more subjective material within the image. Yes, a frame bounds the image, but it is also a frame of regard and connotes passages and transitions.

When you are working with internal rectangles and frames-within-frames, pay special attention to the relationship of these internal frames to the external frame of the image. Your viewers will be scrutinizing this relationship whether they consciously know it or not.

Regularity—or irregularity—matters. A composition where the inner rectangles are lined up in an orderly way presents a very different world view from a composition where the rectangles seem askew or at an angle. In the first case, you have a progression that doesn’t seem to end and represents a reasoned universe. In the second, you have something quirky, unusual, and potentially interesting.

I suggest that you consider the role of internal rectangles and frames-within-frames in any image where you are paying attention to the composition.

A Process of Framing

I’m excited by borders, frames, and boundaries! After all, the real magic happens when one slips from one domain to another—often in shadows, elusively, without being aware of the frame.

By slightly altering a frame, giving it a twist or a tweak, one can change the perception of the viewer and enter the realm of visual sorcery.

At the same time, there is certainly no formula for placing a frame within a frame. Once again, the only rule is that there are no rules. So what I am preaching is mindfulness:

• All images have an outer frame.
• Most images have an inner frame or frames.
• The relationship between the frames in an image, and particularly the inner and outer frames, is very important.
• Sometimes images with internal frames that appear simple are actually quite visually complex. This complexity is often “under the covers.”
• Where does one frame end and another frame begin?
• Can you tell the subject matter that is framed from the content that is doing the framing?

Frames provide the underlying structure for much of creative photography and its compositions. Without the basic frame, there is no content. Without internal frames, there is no dialog between the interior composition and the external world of the frame. So pay particular attention to the questions involving boundaries and borders when you work through the process of framing in your images.