Your Framing Card – Never Leave Home Without It

Walking around with an empty picture frame attached to a stake may be a bit impractical. Instead, take something like a 3" x 5" index card (something heavier duty if possible) and cut a rectangular hole in the centre. Make the hole 3" x 2" if you're using a 35mm or dSLR camera, or 3" x 2.25" if you're using a 4/3rds, or compact or medium format camera (and if you're using another aspect ratio, size the hole accordingly). Leave one side white; paint the other black. You now have a tool used by serious landscape photographers the world over. (In a pinch you can simply make a box with your fingers, then hold it up to your eye.)

Until now, you've probably framed your shots through your camera's finder. Going around holding a little piece of card up to your eye may seem a mite precious and artificial. I want you to get over that. If you're crazy enough in the eyes of the world to lug around a camera and tripod and take pictures of trees and flowers ... and still no one has had you committed, a framing card isn't likely to tip the scales*.

Especially if you use zoom lenses, you are probably thinking you can get the same results by holding your camera to your eye then zooming in or out as needed. Sure – if you happen to have a good 15-500mm zoom handy. Otherwise I urge you to give the framing card a serious try – at least five shoot's worth. No camera's finder has anything like the brightness of the original scene and few cameras have anything like the frame size of even a 3" x 2" card.

But beyond that, the framing card divorces you from all technical aspects of picture taking. Looking through the frame, you are not a photographer, or even a painter, you are a bit closer to what you really want to be at this point in the process - the viewer of your final print, divorced from all considerations of locale, logistics, and picture-taking. You don't want it to matter whether the lens currently on your camera can frame the scene or even whether you even have the correct lens to hand. You don't want your vision impaired by the any dimness of the finder, or your freedom to switch back and forth between wide-angle and telephoto crops impaired by needing to swap lenses. You don't want to be thinking about any of that technical baggage. You only want to be thinking about the one thing that counts during the composition phase: do you have a killer composition or do you not?

Calibrating your framing card is easy. First, put a lens on your camera. Let's say it's a 35 mm. Now look through the finder, making note of exactly what is at the edges of the frame. Now hold the framing card up to your eye, then move it nearer or closer until the view matches what you saw through your camera's finder. Now notice how far the card is from your face. I get about 3" from my face for 35 mm with a 3" x 2" framing card hole. 70 mm will then be 6", etc. No need for great precision. You just want a ball park idea how to translate framing card positions into focal lengths.