Fitting the Frame to the Subject

This exercise was a strange case of planning what you are going to shoot, then getting to the location and shooting something completely different. I planned to travel to Birmingham for this exercise and photograph either the Mailbox or the Council House in Victoria Square. Upon arriving in the city, I found that the 'Birmingham Wheel' was in town. I thought this a potentially exciting subject to work with, and refocused my efforts accordingly.

12mm, f/4.5, 1/2, ISO 200

This first image was taken with my wide angle lens, a Sigma 10-20mm. The wheel is prominent in the frame, but the new Central Library also gets some attention.

19mm, f/5, 1/5, ISO 200

The wheel is now the obvious subject of the image, and I chose a conventional straight-on shot for this image. I didn't crop too closely here, as I wanted to keep a little of the surroundings in for context, and to keep from being too similar to the third image. For this, and the following image I needed to change to my 18-55mm kit lens for the desired focal length.

42mm, f/32, 2, ISO 200

In this image I closed in very tightly, cropping off the top and sides of the wheel. I still wanted to keep some of the crowd in the picture, albeit in shadow, for context, but otherwise the wheel is the only subject in the frame, without any reference to the surroundings apart from the red sign of the Symphony Hall that can be seen through the wheel. As this was such a tightly shot image, I wanted to add further interest, so I used a long exposure of two seconds, to blur the motion of the very slowly moving wheel. This gives a very abstract take on what would otherwise be quite an ordinary photograph.

120mm, f/4.2, 1/20, ISO 200

I wanted a very close shot of the wheel for the final image, so I changed to my Sigma 70-300mm telephoto lens. The obvious target for a closeup shot of the wheel would be the carriages; the challenge lay in taking an image that would also convey the surroundings. There was little choice against a dark night sky, but I felt the large, bright sign of The Rep was a good, especially as it also mentions 'Birmingham', instantly giving a location to the wheel. I particularly like how the wheel is balanced by the sign in this image. I deliberately under-exposed the shot (and decreased the exposure further in post-production) in order to lose the outline of the building and keep just the wheel and the sign.

I enjoyed experimenting with placing my subject in the frame in this exercise. Also I would likely have selected the wheel as a subject before I started this course, I may not have thought about shooting the same subject multiple times with variations on its position in the frame. I also spent quite a lot of time 'working the shot' for this exercise, moving around within the environment and experimenting with different vantage points. Of course, only my final selected shots are displayed here.

This final image shows some other possible crops of the original shot:

1. Similar to my second shot above, except with a different perspective. Here, the wheel is not directly facing the viewer.
2. This is potentially a better crop than the original image, as it keeps all of the main interest in the scene, but removes a lot of 'wasted' frame space in the form of the grass in the foreground.
3. I thought this would make a lovely square crop image, where the library is the main subject, with visitors in the foreground, and the Rep Theatre in the background for context. We have omitted the wheel altogether, as well as the dull grass at the very bottom of the frame.

In terms of these new crops, I think that I prefer (2) and (3) over the original image, mostly because they remove a lot of 'negative space' from the scene, which is distracting and unnecessary. This is something I should bear in mind for the future; my Nikon D50 is only a 6-megapixel camera which means I need each and every last pixel if I want to print my images at any respectable size. Having to crop my work later like this wastes pixels and limits the potential printing size of my new image.