Framing Your Subject - The First Lesson I Learned

The very first lesson that I learned about photography was to frame my subject. As a child I viewed many family photos that were taken by a lot of members of my family. Matter of fact, my sister - just yesterday - posted several photos to Facebook of our family probably 15 years ago. She mentioned that she had thousands of photos to go through!

I remember distinctly seeing pictures where many people's heads were cut off - I'm sure you've experienced the same thing. Or the photo of the family on vacation - the grouping of everybody standing in front of the ocean. Oddly enough, the photographer was standing so far away from the "subject" of the photo that all you saw was a small grouping of people in the center of a large picture of just water and sand. None of the faces were recognizable. 

As I became old enough to pick up a camera on my own (back in the days of the Instamatic with the Cube flash), I was acutely aware of the fear of cutting people's heads off or loosing the subject matter to competing surroundings. Early on people commented on my good pictures.

The owl pictured above was a very willing subject for me recently at the zoo. She is used in the Winged Wonders Bird Show at our local zoo and is happy to be on first hand display to the departing audience. I was excited at this opportunity for a close-up shot of this fabulous raptor. When seeing the outcome of this shot, I was happy. UNTIL it came time to frame the picture to hang on my wall. I ordered a nice 12 X 12 print and the eyes were stunning. Once I tried to put it behind a matte, then frame it I ran into a problem... I had framed my subject so tightly the I had trouble not cutting off the tufts on the top. I finally gave up and mounted it on a board and I hung it unframed.

This golden eagle was another willing subject on the same day. I framed this fellow much better allowing for the framing and matting. 

With new technology, we can even sit at our own homes and order prints at local photo development shops. The programs allow us to choose the size of the photo and crop it as we wish for developing. We have to remember about cropping too closely and allow for the matte and frame around the subject.

I'm still learning about utilizing colors in the matting, that's a blog for another day.