framing — Blog — Fil Nenna Photography

When we get a new camera, especially digital ones, we often change various parameters to make the cameras “ours”. A couple of examples: setting back-button focusing; turning off the focus confirmation beep; picking RAW output rather than JPEG.

But what about all the things we don't change? Or can't? As much as different cameras appear to be designed very differently, there are some common traits that make a lot of photos very similar. A lot if this applies to film cameras, too.

Image orientation

I find it very interesting that when I use my 35mm Pen FT, most of my shots are shot vertical. The images are exposed this way in order to fit 72 images on a usually 36 image roll of film. Same for my iPhone. Notice how people take vertical orientation videos on their phones? It looks awful when viewed on a computer or TV, but the phone is intuitively held that way, and they look acceptable when viewed on the device they were taken on (and most pictures will never leave the phone anyway).

We can switch things up by consciously turning our camera 90 degrees, or switching our image capturing devices for certain situations. I often use a Hasselblad 6x6 film camera for portraits because the square frame doesn’t demand an image orientation decision.

Aspect ratio

A 35mm frame is in the ratio of 3:2, and is the final resting place for most photos. It is interesting that we feel compelled to fix the aspect ratio even when we crop. Medium format digital sensors currently provide a closer-to-square 6:4.5 ratio. You can see what these aspect ratios look like in the blog post I wrote comparing sensor sizes.

Shooting film opens up some alternate restrictions. Some medium format cameras like the Hasselblad 500 shoot in a square format. Some dedicated panoramic 35mm cameras exist, such as the Widelux. Changing the aspect ratio can be refreshing, and can completely alter the feel of a composition.

Ironically, the beauty of digital photography is that we can manipulate images in an infinite number of ways very easily. From square format to super-wide stitched panoramas. It is just hard to pre-visualize these things when the viewfinder is always selling you 3:2.

Of course, aspect ratio and cropping go hand in hand. The image orientation should serve the image. The final use of the image is important here - where will it be displayed? Imaging a great 16:9 composition filled with the subject, but then it needs to be cropped square for Instagram!

One reason most people avoid custom aspect ratios that work for their specific image is that they might be difficult to frame. This is easily solved by custom cutting a mat to fit within a standard frame size, such as cutting an 8x8 hole to mound in a 16x20 frame. I describe this simple process further in this custom mat cutting blog post.

Man waling in Oculus in New York — A long 16:9 or a 3:1 (shown here) aspect ratio is really useful to convey a cinematic sense of space. This crop works great for web-page headers or a custom framed print in a long hallway.

Colour

With film, choosing between colour and black and white is a conscious decision. With digital, most cameras shoot colour out of the box and so most images stay that way.

With digital, it is claimed that “best practice” is to shoot in colour even if you want a black and white final product. Reason being that you can control the tones of each colour individually when making the conversion.

The problem with using a color photo for a final black and white image is that monotone requires a decision at the moment the shutter is pressed, not days later on a whim. Reason being that a satisfactory colour photo may be pleasing, but if each hue is at the same brightness then it will lead to a very flat black and white conversion. Then we spend hours trying to make it look good, or worse, expect a photoshop plug-in to do the work for us. A good black and white photo needs tonal contrast from the get-go. If you are interested in black and white photography, I suggest you immerse yourself in it for a period - you’ll be looking for different things than you would have with a colour mindset. Film might be the best way to do this as you will have to commit to black and white as soon as the camera is loaded.

If you have ideas on default ways of thinking that hold us all back, please leave your thoughts in the comment section below!

Cutting a custom mat for your photographs or artwork is simple and requires only a few specialized tools. I recommend a good mat cutter such as a Logan 2000, and a compatible straight edge which can be used as a guide for the mat cutter (see recommendations at the bottom of this post). Last, you need some scrap mat board for support underneath the mat you wish to cut, and a healing cutting mat to protect your table surface.

Before you begin to cut your mat, you need to figure out the size of the window that will hold the print. I like to have the window a quarter of an inch smaller than the paper sides along each side. So with an 8 by 10 piece of paper I would cut a window 7 1/2 by 9 1/2 inches to leave a quarter of an inch overlap so the print does not fall through the window. Sometimes I like to print my image smaller than the window so there is a quarter of an inch gap between the image and the mat (in which case I would print the image 7 by 9 in).

Work on the back of the mat.

1. Starting at the top left of your mat you can mark out the window width across the top of the mat. The remaining width represents both the left and right borders. So to figure out only the right border, divide this remainder by two and draw a vertical line with your pencil at that position.

2. We can do the same for the bottom border by marking the window height from the top left and then dividing the remaining highlight by two. Draw a horizontal line at this point.

3. Now that the right and bottom boarders are marked, we can use the intersection of a lines as of the bottom-right origin from which we can mark out the window height and the window width. Mark out the final lines for left and top borders.

4. The window is now ready to be cut out with the mat cutter. The image is perfectly centered in the mat.

The problem is that a centrally placed image looks poorly balanced to the viewer. This is an optical illusion. It looks more balanced if the image is placed a little higher than center. When an image has a thicker bottom border than at the top, we call it a” bottom weighted” mat.

5. A simple way to increase the bottom of border in proportion to the size of the image and the size of the mat is to draw a line from the window height mark on the left hand of the mat to the original bottom border line intersects the right hand of the mat.

6. The bottom-right origin point for the window is now where this diagonal line intersects the vertical line.

7. The bottom weighted mat is more visually satisfying and looks distinctly better than any mats you’d find in a commercial frame.

This construction technique is useful for the first mat you cut for a given mat and window size. You now have the border measurements for any subsequent identical mats you need to cut.