Life Is a Viewfinder: Frame It Carefully
What is in your frame is important. Even more important is what you leave out.
Life, like an image through a viewfinder, demands perfect framing.
I am a photographer. I have been for nearly 60 years. (WTF?)
I spend a lot of time looking through a viewfinder and at the world before me… cropped by the constraints of the device.
We call that framing.
What we include in the frame is our ‘photograph’, our vision, our desired outcome.
We frame it up to include the subject in what can be a variety of ways.
Emphasize the left corner or the right. Or center them for a classic feel.
Add empty space that speaks volumes, or a wildly cluttered tapestry of colors and shapes.
It’s OK, it’s our photograph.
It’s not yours, or hers, or that guy over there in the Sears poncho.
Ours.
But as important as the choices in the frame are, the bulk of what is in front of us in the real world is carefully excluded by the frame.
There is far, far more of the world before us excluded than included.
And the stuff that is excluded is actually unimportant, easily ignored, and insignificant in relation to what is carefully framed in front of us.
Life through a viewfinder. Life IS the frame.
Focus on what you see as important, and bring into the frame those things that are important to you. Big things. Small things. Tiny, nearly unseen things.
Those items and people make up your world. Your deliberately composed world. The one you want to make.
The frame.
And the stuff outside the frame?
Pay it little attention.
You left it out for a reason, right?
I am a photographer, designer, and photo editor. You can find me at my self-named website or at Project 52 Pro System where I teach commercial photography online. This is our tenth year of teaching, and it is the most unique online class you will find anywhere.
You can find my books on Amazon, and I have taught two classes at CREATIVELIVE.
