When I am teaching workshops, I emphasize the importance of the frame, and of using the edges and corners that appear in the viewfinder to help compose the final image.
I've been out skiing a few mornings a week and have been alternating between cameras — carrying either my panoramic camera or a standard format digital camera — which present very different viewfinders in which to compose an image.
Going back and forth between the cameras as I've been doing really brings home how much the viewfinder, and the discipline it imposes, affects the images I come back with.
Curiously, I find the exaggerated horizontal view of the panorama format easier to work with. Rather than finding the more restricted frame a challenge, it actually allows me to distill the scene more easily into what is important.
It's this challenging process of identifying and then isolating a particular portion of the world — distilling the scene's fundamental essence — that is at the heart of creative landscape photography.
