Earlier I wrote about how a scene framed by the camera's viewfinder is a distillation of reality.
What I am thinking as I look through the viewfinder is: "What do I include in this scene so that it naturally resolves itself within the frame?" If I am successful, the resulting image, though derived from the larger world, is independent of the reality from which it has been plucked.
Unfortunately, I don't know how to further elaborate on how, exactly, one makes this happen, except to say that I pay close attention to the edges and corners of the frame and sometimes even blur my vision while looking through the viewfinder to see if, in that blurry state, the scene makes sense visually.
I'll change the framing slightly to allow the scene to "resolve" itself — I can see this and "feel" that it makes visual sense — but I can't say exactly how that happens. Since each scene is different, I'm not sure there is a formula one can apply, though the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson described the process as:
"… putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis.”
Indeed.
