Chaos, order, and the importance of edging

Chaos, order, and the importance of edging

One of the cardinal rules of photography is to simplify – to make the many and varied things in front of the camera into a composition that makes sense, and is easy for the viewer to read. The task is to pull a coherent, digestible arrangement of subject and environment from the disorder of everyday life.

I realised this an hour or so before writing, as I took my short walk round the block, and photographed a leaf and a rose. Both are beautiful, and both are close to a busy road that feeds traffic to a junction on the M6. I do not live in an idyllic rural cottage.



You can see the results in the four shots attached to this blog: two framed and exposed as I initially ‘saw’ them, and the other pair deliberately made more contextual by stopping down my 85mm lens from f/1.8 to give greater sharpness in the background, and by reframing to include a couple of bits of background that spoil the look and the mood.

In other words, framing (the rule of thirds and so on) isn’t enough. You need to finesse what’s in frame and what isn’t, to look round the edges of the picture for distractions. To differentiate this from framing and other parts of mainstream composition, I’ll call this process ‘edging’ – making sure that the surroundings don’t spoil your picture.



Many years ago, I first learnt this in a St John’s Ambulance hut in Derby, where a chap called Ralph brought in a bale of hay and half a dozen planks. He leaned the planks against the fibreboard wall, plonked the bale in front of them, and scattered a bit of hay on the lino. And, providing you framed tightly, the model was in a barn, and not a hut just off the A6.

So here’s the challenge for today: go out and find a flower (or a person, at an appropriate distance), and isolate your subject against the nice bit of the surroundings. Edge carefully, and choose an aperture that will make the background fade anyway…