I’ve been thinking about this photo a lot recently. I don’t think it’s a particularly interesting nor beautiful photo — nothing interesting is happening in the left half of the image — but it naturally splits into quadrants of its frame.
This was totally accidental on my part, but it made me realize how under-practiced my eye is at pre-visualizing the world two-dimensionally, and how unintentional I am with my framing and scene analysis on the field. Typically, when I’m out shooting, I’m trying to notice specific details, like a light filtering through the trees to highlight a specific subject, and center-frame that, ignoring everything else happening in the scene. This typically gives my photos a single focal point, and they tend to be fairly simple.
But some of my favorite photos are ones where the whole frame is pulling its weight. Stephen Shore talks about this in this video describing two of his most famous exhibits in this video below (Relevant discussion at 5:54)
So that’s one thing I want to start focusing on, to start flattening the three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional picture frame, so I can pre-visualize the scene better, not just as light/shadow, but also as spatial relationships.
Majd Taby 