Framing Exercise

My alarm clock rings at 5AM Sunday morning. I had placed a weekly alarm at this hour on Saturdays and Sundays to wake up to go out and take pictures, but I hadn't really planned anything for this particular Sunday, and I had already gone out and taken a fair share of pictures the previous day, which should keep me busy all next week as it is.

I snooze it a couple of times, feeling a little lazy and wanting to give myself some minutes more of sleeping before having to decide if I should stay or if I should go. As I snoozed the alarm one more time I wrestled with the idea, and finally convinced myself by telling myself, I was going out this day to practice something in specific, framing.

Now, on the past two occasions I had gone out, I went to these awesome locations, but I wasn't entirely sure what I had brought to the table, so to speak. I had succumbed to the weirdness of the place, and it felt as though the pictures were cool because of the places. It felt like I didn't really try to challenge myself on the composition side of things (needless to say I was wrong, as I came to find out when I went back to edit those pictures), so with this in mind I decided to flex the composition muscle by going out and avoiding the classic compositions I usually gravitate to.

Paired with this was an interest of doing more building/architecture photography I had in the back of the mind, so I opted to go Downtown and find some cool buildings to take pictures of.

As I googled buildings in Phoenix, I determined I wanted to start sunrise at the Chase Building...start from there and see where I ended up at.

Little that I know the freeway I would use to go downtown was closed and the reroute signs were awfully placed. Before I knew it, several u-turns later, I was still trying to figure out how to get downtown, the sun started to rise, at which point I abandoned the idea of going downtown, parked at the first side street I could find, placed my headphones on and walked the sidewalks camera in hand, with the mission in mind.

I'm walking down the side-walk, looking all around me, taking note how the light is lightning up the clouds, the trees and the buildings. that's when I look back and feel a sort of "click" moment, so unsure of what precisely had triggered that, I looked through the camera at the scene, zooming in and out, deciding which things are important to me and taking several shots. I adjust the speed to make it darker. I decide I like the line that is the wall crossing the middle of the frame, I also like how the sidewalk winds from one side of the frame to the other, becoming smaller, and how the trees with the bushes form a sort of line crossing the sidewalk...I frame all these together as best as possible.

I turn around and continue walking down the sidewalk, I look sideways and like the wall to my side, I look at it through my camera, and I start playing around with the lines, "lining" them up, step sideways to my right to create a little more negative space in the shot with the sky, I noticed the end of a palm is there, I shift a little to each side, trying to decide how much distance I want to get from the edge to that palm, then when I go to take the picture I notice I have three horizontal sections in my picture, I shift the camera upwards and downwards, trying to see how much of each section I want present in the overall picture. I double check how my later adjustments have impacted my first ones, adjust accordingly and take my picture:

I continue walking, the camera to my chest, held ready for the next image to frame. I like the red bugambilia planted next to the road, and I naturally feel I should just skip this one, as the road and the cars would inevitably "bleed" into the shot, and then I recall that I'm suppose to challenge myself. I decide to accept the fact this plant is planted beside the road, and use that to guide my composition. when shooting into the street I mostly tend to line myself parallel to the "lines" of the street, and shoot a horizontal composition, and this time I decided to try and position myself differently regarding my subject and used the street/sidewalk lines diagonally:

As I continue walking I muse about the fact that compositions in which you can single out the main object of the image, tend to be more pleasurable to look at. I wonder whether one can obtain a similar reaction, in a very busy frame, and out of the corner of my eye I notice I'm walking past a jungle of unkempt bushes, overgrowing the fence that marks the border and attempt to pleasurably frame a very busy image.

I continue on my way, I'm nearing a corner, in which I decide I'll cross to the right and get closer to the nearest mountains. I walk towards that corner, and I notice to my side a familiar escalating brick pattern that I had already shot, but now I had them in two different planes.

I automatically started walking forward to line myself up with the corner, tree and bricks, when in the spirit of experimenting, I asked myself if I would frame differently, how else would I frame it? and I realize that what I wanted to achieve by lining myself up exactly in front of that corner was a disparity when the background bricks appear to be right next to the foreground ones, but smaller. Thinking of this I then decide to keep both planes obvious and separate. Since I had a tree in front of me I also had to decide if I wanted to line it up with the edges of the wall, if I want it right smack in the middle of the frame or what. I ended up opting for not lining it up with the edge of the wall, not just quite at the center, in fact both the tree and the edge of the brick wall would share the middle between them.

I continue walking, I reach the corner and wait for the street light to cross the street and continue on my way, walking up a sidewalk directly into the hills. The sidewalk here started to show a wider variety of plants, very well kept. I spot a Saguaro seemingly sprouting from an aloe type of cacti, I first decide to walk past it because I had immediately noticed they were in close proximity to a variety of different plants that capturing what I had in mind was not possible. I stop myself and walk back to the spot where I spotted this. I looked through the camera and decided to make use of the surrounding elements in the composition:

I resume my pace and off to my right I see a bush that looks like its peering at me from that sidewalk, and take a picture of its eyes:

I continue along, realizing I have been mostly observing plants on the ground or walls, I lift my gaze to see how the sunrise is coloring the scene around me. I see these palms, their silhouette highlighted by the sun and then a grey block wall starts. Although using a wall that leads off into the distance is pretty common as compositions go, I thought what the hell, not everything has to be experimental:

I find some bushes that I've always enjoyed the combination of colors they have, yellow branches, interlacing the red-brown stems and pale green leaves. The only problem is that its so abundant and busy, that its hard to capture in a way you can appreciate the combinations of colors and the round pattern they grow in.

I found a similar bush growing around a taller one, and I wanted to see if I could capture it without having to incorporate the taller one. In my minds eye I traced a line around the edges of this dry bush, and could almost picture it having a spade like shape, I center my shot around that imaginary spade silhouette, and take my shot:

I also found some funky looking cactus, that I would normally not attempt to capture because the surrounding elements just made it such a busy composition, but I decided to gave it a go as well.

In one of the cactus I liked the direction of its shape, I walked around it and faced it in a way I could maximize that direction it had, the thorny bush behind it provided some counter weight to it:

The other cactus, from the same perspective I was from the previous one, seemed like a lady, leaning in selling her wares or flowers:

Still thinking to myself how difficult are busy images to frame, I seek out more of this and try to organize the chaos in a way I can appreciate. Sometimes I find a feature of the image that has a clearly defined orientation, direction, shape or color, and experiment if I can organize the different elements around those. In this first one, the wall and house both have clear horizontal and vertical lines, and I line up the chaotic lines of the tree and the thorny bush with them:

Or in this second one, I use the curvature of the tree and the firm line of the wall, to frame the chaos within. I side step a little to let the sun peak into this frame, I shift the direction of the camera to give a little space between the palms and the edge, take a shot and adjust the settings to make the foreground darker:

I turn around calling it a wrap and I notice like the sidewalk I had been walking on. I ask myself what elements were important to me about the sight, and I decided I like the windy path and the irregular but rhythmic shape of the grass as it borders along the windy path. I zoom in a bit to exclude the street and other distracting elements, corner the end of the path and let the sight grow from the upper left to the lower right: