reframing

Leave room to reframe your photographs

One of the things I noticed when I switched from 120 medium format film back to digital, was the extra step I had to take with every single one of my photographs. I had to crop them to square. Digital sensors are usually rectangles, 3:2 ratio, so I was capturing more of the scene than I really needed.

At first, I thought that was a waste of my time and of space. After all, after cropping the RAW files to a square, a third of the "negative" was going unused. That could add up quickly, especially if you shoot a lot of images like I do.

Anyway, over time, I started to see how useful that information to the left and the right of what I had seen in the field could be. It allowed me to reframe images where I could have done better, or to discover slightly different compositions from the one I had seen in location.

I liked it so much that I wanted to do the same on the top and bottom of the frame. So every time I was about to take a photo, I'd take a step back to capture a little bit more of the scene.