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 make photographs that are nuanced, complex, or powerful.

To unabashedly mix my metaphors: early lessons were only about learning to hit the first notes, not to write a song.

One of those early lessons that took me longer to get beyond was the need to fill the frame with my subject. Wait, scratch that. I still believe it’s important to fill the frame, but I understand that idea now in much stronger ways. I give my earliest teachers the benefit of the doubt: they wanted me to learn the basics. In this case, they wanted me to avoid filling my frame with elements that were not my subject—distractions and the kind of flotsam and jetsam that seems to drift into our frames when we’re not intentional about our compositions.

But your subject might not be the thing you think it is.

See the image below. The animal in the frame is a coastal wolf. A younger me would have called that my subject, but she is not. My subject is not the wolf but, rather, the wolf in the landscape. It’s the relationship, and zooming in tight (as I might have done in the past in an effort to “fill the frame”) would have diluted the intended subject of the image.

Perhaps “fill the frame with your story” is a better way to put it because so many people think their subject is the thing. I think the subject is the idea. The story. And very often, the only way to tell the story effectively is to make the thing smaller in the frame so there’s room to fill that frame with other elements that make the story bigger.

Look at the photograph below. The man on the dunes—is he the subject? What would the story lose if I cropped in much tighter? It would change, wouldn’t it? The image wouldn’t be about the desert with a man in it. It wouldn’t be about size, or vastness. It would be about a man with a camera. That wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. It wasn’t the feeling I wanted to create. So I filled the frame with the vastness. The man wasn’t the point; he just helped amplify the point, and he needed to be smaller to do that.

Look at the other three images below. What might they have lost if I had gone tight and made yet another portrait? Would I have lost story? Mood? Visual depth and interest? Would my picture be about something different? Would they be any better?

Wildlife photographers in particular are notoriously good at filling the frame with things. Beautiful, wild things, shot as close as possible, but the more I look at the tighter images, the less story I see. That’s OK; not every photograph needs to tell a story. Sometimes those tighter images are part of a larger story told with more than one photograph. I hope they do that in my own work. But they don’t tell the whole story.

My big challenge to myself, because I’m also learning, is to think bigger by going smaller.

More and more, I find myself dissatisfied with the longest lens/tightest portrait shot. I reach increasingly for the shorter lenses and let myself wrestle with composing a bigger story by letting the main characters share the stage. Pulling back gives scale, gives context, and gives more room for the light and colour to be their own characters. I find myself inhabiting the world of these bigger pictures a lot longer, exploring them visually for longer than I do with my tighter work. I remember them longer, and their impact feels deeper to me.
 
Of course, this is not only about shooting wider. That’s easy. But as you pull back and include more elements, each of those elements needs to play a part. It can’t just stand on the stage doing nothing. It’s harder to make a meaningful and satisfying image in which all the elements do that. Maybe that’s why the tighter portrait is more common; it’s just a little easier. And I’m not saying those photographs can’t be powerful. They can. But they can also hit the same note a few too many times. They can tell an intimate story, but not a larger story.

My internal quest these days has become a search for scenarios, not just “subjects,” though here I use that word the way I used to mean it: as thing.

Because I’m looking for bigger pictures with layers of impact, not just looking for an elephant (“subject”). I’m looking for a scenario: an elephant with a calf, in a tender moment, in interesting light and a captivating setting. I want to fill my frame with those rather than reaching for my 600mm and excluding them all. Or, more likely, I’ll explore both. But it’s the one with some scale that I think will play much larger and give both my imagination and my emotions more to engage with.
 
For what it’s worth, I still sometimes shoot with the sun over my shoulder. I haven’t discarded the idea; I’m just happier with backlit or sidelit scenes. I don’t find the rule of thirds completely useless. Look at my work! Plenty of things sit on thirds in my frames. And yes, I sometimes still fill the frame with those things.

The ideas we learn at the beginning don’t stop being useful, but if we want our craft to grow, we need to evolve beyond them and explore all the possibilities.

What would your work look like if you redefined what it means to fill the frame? If you looked at the subject of an image as the idea, story, or the feeling, not the one physical thing on which you set your focus point? What would it feel like if you pulled back a little and gave the other characters—not just living things but trees, rocks, sky, light, space, texture—some room to help tell a bigger story?

Scale is a powerful tool. I’m not going to tell you how to use it, but I’m begging you to explore it

For the Love of the Photograph,
David