I’m asked on occasion, which images currently represent where I’m at, artistically. It’s the kind of question I personally love, as I do tend to reflect a lot about where I’m at creatively speaking, and it is perhaps the basis for most of the posts you read on this blog.

I think as a creative, we should always find surprise in our work. A pleasure from finding that we have reached some location in our creativity that we feel we have not been before.

I am not so sure that this happens as much when you are perhaps twenty years down the line in your own photography: progress is not linear for sure, but I have often felt that the biggest leaps and bounds in anyone’s progress as a creative usually happens in the first five to ten years. After that, it may be a process of refinement of the level of ability / creativity that we’ve managed to reach (whatever that may be).

I’m much less interested in subjects these days, and I’m aware that the work has become more graphical and abstract. It is where my current leanings are. But I also think I keep wishing to explore a sense of mystery in my photography. If I were to say that one of my images had managed to do that lately it would be the one above in this very post.

I am usually a stickler for avoiding things coming in to the edges of the frame. I think as a beginner we tend to not see distractions at the edges of the picture, and it takes years perhaps to work on this and clean up our compositional abilities.

Then there must come the unlearning.

Unlearning can only happen once we’ve learned something. I wouldn’t have dared put branches in the side of the picture as I did with this image, if I’d composed this a decade ago. It is only in the process of tightening up my compositions so much, that I now have the confidence to put things in around the edges. Or to be more precise: to use the edges of the frame as a valid area for composition. Edges can have more power than the central area of the frame, simply because our periphery notices things in the edges more than we do in the centre. Often this means we notice distractions, but if we put something towards the edge of the frame it should, in my view, be there for a reason. It should not be an afterthought.

But what if we conceal the branches at the corner / edge of the frame? What if they are cloaked to a degree? Does this mean they may be conveyed as an after thought? or as an ill-conceived compositional element? Or do they provide mystery?

My hunch is that the way I’ve edited the scene, and deliberately darkened down the branches so they are more of a hint than a main compositional feature, allows them to be viewed as somewhat mysterious.

It’s not something I have regularly done in the past, and I was surprised to feel that it worked all the same. All I can say is that I am more confident at placing elements towards the edges of the frame, and sometimes rather than making them obvious to the viewer, I can leave them to be more suggestive rather than literal.

I think it is an aspect I would like to talk about in my forthcoming e-book update on Composing using different aspect ratios.