Turning an Obstacle Into the Subject

August 7, 2022

Have you ever run into a photography scene in which you couldn’t figure out how to frame the subject, no matter how you pointed the camera, what focal length you used, or where you stood, crouched, twisted or turned?

When that happens, it may be worth reevaluating what you have chosen as your scene and what it is that you’re truly trying to capture. Why is it that you have difficulty framing your image? Is there a particular aspect of the scene that serves as an obstacle? Once you have identified that obstacle, can you turn it onto its head and make that obstacle into the image? 

Here is an example of this process. I was photographing a church in Germany’s Schwarzwald (Black Forest) area. It was a gorgeous, domed structure, with most of the interior made out of white marble. The space was also quite large in all dimensions, which made it hard to frame. To capture the full scale of the interior required an extremely wide angle, which in turn resulted in significant distortions of the columns around the domed interior - not the look I was going for. 

After struggling for a while with trying to frame the interior in a way that conveyed its scale without those extreme distortions, I realized that that same sheer scale was the obstacle. Was there another way I could show that scale, without running into the distortion issue? 

There weren’t many people in the church, and at some point there was just one woman sitting down. She provided the perfect sense of scale: one small person in a sea of empty seats with two vanishing points highlighting the voluminous interior of the church. It was more than that: she added a human element that helped convey the peace and quiet that exuded from the scene. To me, that summarized what I was originally searching for. 

Moving away from trying to capture the entirety of the interior and focusing on something that clearly illustrated that same scale via contrast ended up being the approach to a more successful image.

Dom St Blasien I — Schwarzwald, Germany