Image of the Week: Whitney, Citronelle, Alabama

Occam's Camera

Many of you may be familiar with the principle of Occam's Razor, a philosophical and scientific axiom that is best summarized as, "The simplest solution is usually the best." The principle espouses an economy of ideas to explain the unknown, encouraging one to whittle away the useless, the irrelevant, and the needlessly complex.

It's a great way to think about photographic composition.

If you think about a scene or subject as a problem and the photograph as a solution, then the Razor applies. The process of composing a photograph is nothing more than the stripping away of the extraneous image until you you are left with the core message -- the central idea -- the simplest idea -- of the scene.

The subject is the unstated message, the photograph is your voice. If you fail to strike a balance between including too much and too little, the photograph will fail; you might as well say nothing at all.

The uncropped photograph

This week's image was shot with a Hasselblad 500CM, a camera that produces a 6cm x 6cm square image. Shooting in square is convenient: you don't have to turn the camera on its side for vertical format. If you want a vertical or horizontal, you crop the square. I usually compose my images as squares shooting with this camera, but every so often I visualize alternate crops to enhance the subject's moment.

Compare the uncropped image (above, left) to my cropped version, and let me know what you think.

Have questions or comments? Send me an email.

Technical Data

Whitney, Citronelle, Alabama was photographed with a Hasselblad 500CM and a Zeiss 80mm ƒ/2.8 T* lens on Kodak TMax 400 film (TMY-2). The exposure was 1/250 sec at ƒ/11.

Other Images of the Week