"Position is where everything happens from."
Frederick Sommer
Last month I spent most of an afternoon in a creperie in Montreal, sitting, chatting with my wife and occasionally raising my camera and photographing the scene outside our window.
No big deal, no great thoughts involved other than 'hey, there is a lot going on outside this window and maybe I can see an image or two that might be interesting mementos of our vacation' and 'I can do this without diminishing the pleasure of the company we were enjoying'.
In short I simply wanted a couple of snapshots.
Yet even with all of the above relaxation of my own little shooting rules I was still maintaining some of my disciplines such as; manual focus, manual exposure and most importantly each image to have the same framing.
As I captured the above image I was felt the gratitude that Minor White described so well for that particular "gift" given to me though the camera.
Yet I knew there was something else there and I waited patiently wishing, of course for the guide to move a little so that I might see the face behind him, never mnd my rules and disciplines I was precluded from moving by the wall behind me as well as the table and escargots in front of me.
"Look to the left!" said my wife quietly.
'What, you mean break my rules?'
"Hey, I'm on holiday, of course I can" I thought as turned the camera.
Which brings us back to the quotation from Sommer above and
"It helps to realize that the frame is not a natural thing at all, it is an imposition on vision. The paradox, of course, is that the frame is a very important contributor to content in a photograph. What is included, what is left out, and what is cut can be, and frequently is, the central meaning in a photograph".
Philip Perkis
Had I maintained my self imposed framing rule the second image would never have been captured, or even seen.
