Book Review: Within the Frame

Every amateur photographer has a fantasy alter-ego. Bankruptcy aside, I’m sure many envy Annie Leibovitz and have an imaginary career publishing photos of cultural icons for Vanity Fair. Others drool over Ansel Adams and wish they had his impact on landscape photography. Me? I daydream of carrying a Leica around the world. I’d create captivating photo essays that help viewers understand something new about this amazing planet we live on, and I’d be regularly published in National Geographic. In other words, I’d be David DuChemin.

If you have a similar daydream, Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision is the book for you. This is not a technical how-to book, nor is it a generic composition/aesthetic book. It’s basically a 250 page manual on how to be like David. I’ve put the book’s contents into two buckets in my mind. The first 64 pages are a lightweight treatment of photographic vision & composition. It’s a good overview, and it’s refreshing to find a book that focuses on this instead of f-stops. But I prefer Freeman’s The Photographer’s Eye when I want to study composition.

I got the most out of the middle three chapters: Storytelling, Photographing People, and Photographing Places. (The final chapter on photographing culture didn’t do it for me.) The Storytelling chapter helped me think of different techniques for using both single frames and photo essays to tell stories. I’m practicing on my personal blog. For my post on the Puyallup Fair, I picked an establishing shot, a detail shot, a portrait, and a closer.

“Swinging Spectator.” I owe this photo to Within the Frame. First, I went to the fair looking for establishing shots for a photo essay. I also thought ahead and knew I wanted photos of the rides. When Alex kept staring at this ride, I saw an opportunity to create foreground/background layers. I slowed the shutter as much as I could in the bright sun to capture movement in the swing.

The chapters on photographing people & places are self-explanatory and dense with helpful tips. What’s most helpful, though, is just the general encouragement and mindset in the chapters. For instance: Photographing strangers is hard. Get over it and do it. And when you do, you owe it to your subject to get the best picture possible. Don’t exclusively rely on clandestine grab shots. Photographing places: Find the right balance between planning your shots and just walking around lost.

Throughout the book you’ll find gorgeous photos, and you’ll learn as much from the photos and their captions as you will from the text. I know the pictures will reward repeated study. And throughout the book, you’ll be reminded to make each photograph about something. This is what DuChemin means when he writes about “vision,” and the most valuable thing about this book is it helped me get that elusive concept. This earns Within the Frame a place on my photography bookshelf.