Small in Frame, Big in Story

Some of my earliest lessons in this craft served me very well—at the beginning. As I’ve grown, they have stopped being helpful. I suspect this is true for you, too. I was told to put the sun behind me. I was told to fill the frame with my subject. I was told that if I divided the frame into thirds and put the subject on one of those magical lines, then my photographs would be more interesting. For a while, these ideas helped make sense of an otherwise overwhelming craft. They were good lessons for a young photographer making the kinds of photographs a young photographer makes. I am not a young photographer anymore, and I’m guessing you aren’t, either. You only need a couple of years behind the camera to understand the basics that those initial lessons were meant to teach you. But they weren’t meant to be the only lessons. They were lessons meant for starting, but not for growing. They were meant to make things easy and to get you some early wins with the camera, not to equip you to…