Tips on filling the frame

Getting back to the original purpose of this site, which was to offer my humble advice and tips on ways to improve your news photography, I wanted to share an experience from today's shoot featuring two people from local businesses who pay for all the presents at a community Christmas party for around 50 kids.

Obviously I want to produce good results at every job, but it was especially important to come up with the goods from this shoot because I had personally asked the Press & Journal to cover the story. In all honestly it's probably a bit of a small story for the P&J but I thought it was important that these businesses get some acknowledgement for their support of this party, which they fund every year without making any effort to get publicity out of it.

I arranged to do the shoot at the village hall where the party will be held, because there's a Christmas tree there, which could make a good background. And the party organiser agreed to come along with all the wrapped presents. But even though I knew about the shoot a couple of days in advance, and I had a 2-hour drive to get there, it wasn't until I was pulling in to the car park that I finally had a set-up idea that I thought might work. This was the result:

There are three lights doing the work in that shot: Canon 580EX behind the people as a rim light, and two Bowens 1000DX studio lights at the front, one on each side.

Pretty good shot, I'd say, but I wanted to produce at least two different set-ups. After a bit of experimentation I came up with another composition that I thought might work. Here's a test shot:

Not very good, eh?

So here's the tip for today. It's an obvious one, but it's easy to forget when you're in the middle of a shoot and you've got half a dozen other things to concentrate on, so I think it's worth mentioning.

By shooting from above and wide angle, which I didn't want to change, I had left a huge gap in the bottom-right of the frame. Now as soon as you see a gap like that on your camera's review screen, the inclination is to re-think the set-up. And that's what my instinct told me to do on this occasion. But I was starting to feel a bit embarrassed about how much I was struggling to produce a good shot, and thankfully the idea popped in to my head that if I gave the lady one of the presents to hold, that would (1) fill that empty corner of the frame, and (2) help to emphasise the number of presents paid for by the donations.

With presents hastily pushed in to the hands of both people, and a few more presents stacked on the pile at the back to build it up a bit, I immediately liked the way the composition was looking. I kept fine-tuning a bit, adjusting the way the lady was holding the presents, and soon produced a shot that looked well-structured but not too posed or over-worked.

The point? Like I said, it's obvious, but it's important to remember. You'll often find compositions that are 75% good, but have one corner of the frame looking a bit empty. When that happens, before you re-think the whole composition, see if there's anything you can use to fill that quarter frame. You might even find that you improve the picture's relevance by having it tell the story better.

Here are a few more examples…

Using a combination of off-angle shooting, perspective compression and frame-filling to make an awards photo more eye-catching than usual:

Using a human to fill an empty corner! If you're photographing one person, but there's a relative or friend nearby who is connected to the story, then grab some frames with them too, like this shot of a young cart racer with his father:

It's easy to fill three corners of the frame with the people you're photographing, which conveniently leaves one corner to be filled with any books, certificates, trophies, sports equipment, drawings, etc, that are relevant to the story. These two girls had their poetry published in a compilation book:

You can also make the 'prop' corner of the frame more prominent to create a more dramatic and eye-catching image, that will naturallly make the viewer stop flicking through the paper and start reading the story. (I see that as the job of an editorial photographer — not just to illustrate the story, but to help sell the reporter's words by making the story look as interesting as possible.) These children had reached the semi-finals of a spelling competition, so we used a dictionary, opened at the word 'surveillance', which one of the boys had said was the hardest word he had been asked to spell in the competition: