Pixiq

A good travel photo (or any photo for that matter) arranges the elements in a scene in order to feature and highlight its subject. Like a centerpiece in a formal table setting, the main subject needs to echo the place settings around it, yet still be bold enough to stand on its own as the focal point. One device that many professional travel photographers use to design this unified look is to position the intended subject within a naturally occurring frame in the scene. Tree limbs, doorways, windows, gates or even the legs of a table (or a cow if you’re careful and have a change of clothes) all make good foreground frames.

Frames-within-frames can serve several purposes. For one, they act as visual signposts that draw attention to your main subject by physically isolating it from its surroundings. For another, they subdue or eliminate peripheral clutter that you can’t otherwise exclude. If you’re photographing a street musician in New Orleans, for example, and there is just too much chaos on the streets around him, framing him through a bit of wrought-iron fencing lets you focus attention on him, while de-emphasizing the outlying clutter.

When photographed with a wide-angle lens, frames-within-frames can establish or exaggerate a sense of depth and distance. If you’re photographing a sailboat in a harbor at sunset, you can frame it through an old ship’s anchor to stretch the sense of space in the scene (while reinforcing the nautical theme). Conversely, to contract the space between the frame and the subject you can switch to a longer focal-length lens (or zoom in) and use the inherent compression of the telephoto effect to squeeze them together—making them seem closer than they actually are.

Regardless of how you use a frame, choose one that links visually or thematically to the subject. In his photo of the Agra Red Fort in India, photographer Daniel Kohanski carefully framed one of the fort’s towers through an arched window that echoes the architectural style of the historic building it encloses. Kohanski followed a similar technique in his photograph of a church on the remote Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea (between Alaska and Russia).