Is Framing A Better, Or Is It B?

Perhaps I'm indecisive, well, ok, I am indecisive, but perhaps you too find this a problem when shooting. You find something interesting to photograph and you work the scene and several possible viewpoints and framings seem possible. How the hell do you decide which one is best?

With digital and large memory cards and portable hard drive backups, the easy solution is to photograph each and every one and make the decision after you get home. To a significant degree that is in fact what I do, often taking a dozen different minor variations of the same image, sometimes even taking so many I forget by the last one which ones I have already done and duplicating already recorded compositions.

It's been my experience that doing so has saved my 'butt' on numerous occasions as only after the fact is it apparent that one of these viewpoint/framing combinations works really well and the others aren't nearly as good.

Still, one could imagine being so indecisive that you end up taking hundreds of pictures, creating a nighmare of storage problems down the road, if nothing else. Too, you have to take into consideration that the process of recording all these 'second class' images takes time. Even in landscape photography, lighting is often fleeting, the wind comes up, things change and you need to be relatively efficient at getting the image - besides you'll drive anyone with you crazy if you keep them waiting that long.

So, somehow we need to be able to pick the good compositions from the bad - at some point, you need to look through the viewfinder and tell yourself, In can do better, I can find more, this could be improved, and not take the picture.

It's as if there is a threshold below which the quality of the image isn't enough to bother pressing the button, even if you can't subsequently improve on the viewpoint or framing. Our automatic eye that I wrote about last time in 'writing photographs' finds the possible winners, not the absolute ones. The 'automatic' eye tends to look at what works, rather than what doesn't, so that having found a possible image, we need to scan the scene for the elements that don't work as much as those that do. Our 'automatic' eye might have found an intersting S bend in the image, but our discriminatory brain rejects it as not being strong enough, or as being compromised by other elements in the image which can't be eliminated.

Learning to be discriminating and to raise that threshold of 'possible image' gradually higher is a major part of becoming a good photographer. Being aware that this threshold even exists helps I think speed the process of improving. Still doesn't in the end tell you whether A or B is better, but perhaps you can cut down your film and backup costs.

I can't imagine myself working with a single sheet of very large format film for any given scene, praying to get it right in one. Guess that's why I shoot digital.