Creative Paths
Tucking away some minute action can add a unique and fun layer of interest to images
Michael Freeman’s words of wisdom on ornamental action
This kind of action sits in a strange limbo area between important and insignificant, because it happens in only a small part of the frame. Apart from a simple difference of scale from normal ‘action’ shots, there’s the much more important matter of the relationship between the small action and the larger setting. Which has the priority, and how do you expect the viewer to look at the frame? ‘Ornament’ may sound trivial – it’s a carefully chosen word – but like the sort of ornament we’re familiar with, in say architecture, jewellery, and design in general, it can play an important part
in the photograph. Ornaments are never really there by accident.
In these days when clean modernist simplicity still tends to hold sway, it might sound a little unfashionable and fussy, but as I’ll explain, don’t dismiss it as all too incidental. It’s often the deciding factor that tips the balance between reasonable and successful. The idea is to frame a scene in such a way that the setting looks good and the composition works – while at the same time something is happening in a small way to give it life and add additional interest.
The French photographer Robert Doisneau described the situation that merits ornamental action as: “So you have a little theatre. All you have to do is wait there in front of this little theatre for the actors to present themselves.”
I framed it this way so that this tiny scene within the scene is tucked away in a corner and not drawing attention
The little theatre
There are, to me at least, two kinds of photograph that can use this strategy. One is a scene that is just about okay, more or less fine, but what you really want is to take it up a notch by means of some animation in a small slot within the frame. The other is a framing that is really only going to work if it includes the small action within it. It may seem like splitting hairs if you’re doing a post-mortem on a picture, but when you’re there behind the camera it’s completely essential. In either case, the shot with the action taking place is almost always going to win out.
In this example, I liked the compactness of the scene, looking upriver at the town of Lynmouth in Devon, and the squashed perspective of the stone bridge, houses and steep hillside from a 200mm lens. The way the light fell had a lot to do with this, particularly on the descending row of houses. The sunlit white end of the first house draws the eye like a magnet, and it was only after a few seconds that I noticed two boys playing on a rock in the river. One was throwing stones, and that made the shot. I framed it this way so that this tiny scene within the scene is tucked away in a corner and not drawing attention at first.
In a situation like this, when you have some time to find the exact viewpoint and framing, and decide what focal length to use, it’s always worth thinking about how other people will look at the image. This isn’t (yet) an exact science, but here the basics are easy to predict. The viewer’s eye goes first to the white house and starts to look outward.
There are the other buildings, of course, and the old bridge. One of the things about balance in an image is that when the obvious point of interest is way off centre, as here, the eye sooner or later goes to the other side of the frame to see if there’s anything there. In this case there is, but because of the light and the position in the lower left corner there’s a delay. This is an old technique used in classical paintings, and the effect is deliberate – to look incidental while enlivening it and bringing motion.
Processing also has a role to play… The dynamic range in this scene was high, and exposing to hold the highlight on the white house meant that the rest was quite dark. The controls in modern processing software (I use ACR in Photoshop) allow a wide range of interpretation, so the trick here was to bring up the two boys to a reasonable level of brightness without overdoing it. Without that attention, as the smaller, unprocessed version shows, they can become a little lost.