Although my career is about photographing people on one of their biggest days of their lives, I also enjoy capturing travel images and interesting architectural designs. I try to use these same compositional skills when photographing people as I want to ensure that my backgrounds and foregrounds are also interesting, as they are essentially the frames for your living subjects.
When my wife and I were in Italy, we found that the window frames there were either elegantly decorated, or so weathered from the elements that they looked almost like beautifully made art props. Many were surrounded by beautiful flowers in many styles of planter boxes (likely because there are few open gardens in these close-quartered, Medieval cities), and there were others that were painted in striking colors as they contrasted with the walls around them.
I wanted to find window frames that allowed me to get a composition that was interesting. Essentially, here I was making the windows the subject of my photographs. There were some windows frames that I liked; however, I couldn’t get into a position to capture it how I envisioned it, so some didn’t get any photos taken of them. But in the images below, I felt the windows gave a sense of the experience of Italy, and I wanted that to bring that feeling back in the photo.
Although we can’t all travel to fantastic photography locations like Florence and Venice, Italy (we went for our honeymoon), we can find some very interesting landscapes and architecture in our hometowns - it just takes a little looking around. Why not give yourself a small assignment and see if you can capture some photographs of static subjects like doors and windows? I think you’d be surprised at what you find just by keeping your eyes open while you’re out and about.
