Practice question · Multiple choice
A painter builds an image by addition, whereas a photographer operates strictly through exclusion. What follows from this distinction when considering what lies beyond the camera's viewfinder?
Hints
- Does setting a boundary eliminate the influence of the surrounding space, or define its relationship to the subject?
- How does the physical cut made by the lens differ from simply discarding recorded negative area later?
Show the answer
A. Off-frame elements actively structure meaning despite being excluded
Why
Exclusion is an active compositional choice that charges off-screen space (fora de camp) with meaning rather than eliminating it. Cropping is merely a post-capture reduction of resolution, not the initial optical selection made at the moment of taking.
Practise The Frame: What Is In and What Is Out
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Photography I is free to start.
More questions on The Frame: What Is In and What Is Out
- Two photographers stand in the same place with the same lens at a demonstration. One frames so that the line…
- Sort each element by its relation to the frame.
- Cropping a full 35 mm frame to a square discards one third of the negative area.
- Complete the vocabulary of the frame.
- Which of these are true of the frame as an act of exclusion?
- Match each term to what it names.
- Arrange these acts of exclusion in the order they occur in the making of a picture.
- A typical non-professional single-lens reflex viewfinder showed less of the frame than actually reached the…
- Burch divided off-frame space into four segments, one beyond each edge of the frame.