Text and Framing

 One of my favorite things to do when taking photos is to crop the photo and adjust the frame after the fact. This is equally because it's a powerful tool that really alters the meaning of the photo in question, and equally because I don't know how to edit photos in any other meaningful way. I often feel like an old man when digital technology is involved. The end results, though, are very satisfying to me because the photos really do change when the frame is altered. I decided to try and mess with the way the framing is done, either active or passive, by cropping the photo. Most of my pictures have an active frame because I prefer to have very active sides of my frames, so finding a picture of mine to alter in my more recently scanned rolls was somewhat difficult. Nonetheless, here is what I found:

I found this picture, which has a more passive frame than most of my pictures. So I decided to change that by cutting the subject (the tree) in half to divide the frame into neat thirds. In this one I liked the harsh geometric properties that this step brought out. This is something I go for in all photos I take.

I went for something similar when I took this picture of the same tree:

Again, I think the active frame lends a sharpness and geometric quality.

Finally, for the final picture I was inspired by a comment that was left for me by a classmate. Naomi wrote: "I think you could find a metaphor between the faults in human memory and the blanks/faults in the images". I used that to write a short poem that started: "Torn apart by your hunt for perfection, I can see you've begun to lose your mind". I decided to include this in a photo I took, and I wanted it to look like a fault, or be obfuscated in some way. Here's what I made: