photobyjohnbo

Cellpic Sunday – Building a Frame

Building a Frame.

West Fargo, North Dakota.

Last month, Amy of the Lens-Artists Team challenged us with using elements of a scene to create a frame around the main subject of a photo. While having lunch with friends, I glanced out the window and spotted two construction workers building a frame and quickly grabbed my cell phone to add another image to my challenge response.

For this week’s Cellpic Sunday, I decided to expand upon the concept and why framing the subject is an effective composition tool. Like leading lines that draw the viewer into the image, framing the subject, natural or man-made as in this example, draws the viewer’s eyes to the subject.

In a busy scene, framing is helpful to de-emphasize distractions in the image when cropping isn’t appropriate. It can be used in conjunction with the Rule of Thirds as in the composition above. I put the subjects in the center square of the grid and cropped the image square. As it happened, their project was helpful in creating a balanced grid.

While this image really lends itself to a framed composition, there are many ways photographers can apply compositional techniques to achieve the desired result. I found an article that lists several techniques for adding frames within your photos here.

About the photo: I used my Samsung S23U with the 10X optical zoom to capture these workers who were about a half-block away from the restaurant where we were having lunch. I shot it in vertical format and loaded it into Lightroom Classic for straightening and cropping. Then I sent it off to Luminar Neo to apply some Enhanced AI, noise reduction, and to tweak the exposure. Pixel-peepers can check out the image in 2K HD on my Flickr site here.

I encourage fellow bloggers to create their own Cellpic Sunday posts. I never have a specific topic for this feature, and the only rules are that the photo must be captured with a cell phone, iPad, or another mobile device… If you have an image from a drone or even a dashcam, that’s acceptable as well. The second rule is to link your challenge response to this post or leave a comment here with a link to your post in the comment. Oh, and, you don’t have to post it on a Sunday.

John Steiner

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