Have you ever been on vacation, pulled out your camera upon seeing a picturesque view, and then been somewhat under whelmed with the final results? If so, you just learned the first rule of photography: reality, as seen by your camera, is quite different from what you see with your own eyes. If you frame all of your pictures without taking that into account, you will always be disappointed.

There are a few reasons why what your camera sees is different from what you see. First of all, your eyes aren’t little optical machines that function in a vacuum. Instead, all that you see is supplemented, enhanced, and interpreted by your brain. In a sense, when you see a majestic landscape while hiking through the backwoods of Kauai, some of the splendor of the scene is actually being added by your mind. Lift the camera to that same view, and you get a totally objective representation of the scene, without any intelligent enhancements. That’s because the camera actually is a little optical machine. And it does not have a brain. And then there’s the fact that a camera has a much more limited range of focus, exposure, and composition than you do. When you look at a scene like the Hawaiian landscape I just mentioned, you might think you’re seeing a fairly static scene with your eyes. But that’s not really the case. In fact, as your eyes dart around, you are constantly recomposing the scene, since you can dynamically change the visual “frame” in which you are viewing the scene. To make matters worse (for the camera anyway), the aperture of your eyes, called the pupil, changes size  constantly in response to the changing lighting conditions of where you’re looking. The result? You don’t realize it, but your eyes, working in conjunction with your brain, are creating a visual feast that is difficult, if not impossible, to reproduce on paper.
In comparison, it’s amazing that we can get good pictures at all with a camera. Film -and by film I mean both 35mm and digital—has a much narrower exposure range than your eyes because the aperture freezes a single instant in time with a fixed set of lighting conditions. And unlike the magical pictures in the Harry Potter series of books, real photographs cannot change their composition or framing on the fly. What you see in the viewfinder is, unfortunately, what you are stuck with forever.

Look around. What do you see? If you look carefully, you’ll notice that your field of vision
is a rectangle with rounded corners—almost a wide ellipse. In other words, we see the world panoramically. While there are some cameras and some techniques for creating panoramic photographs, most of the time this is not the kind of shot we take.
Nope - our job as photographers is to take the panorama that we see with our own eyes and translate it into an attractive photograph using the laws of photographic composition. There’s often more than one way to frame a picture; it’s really your job to decide which works best for the kind of photograph you are trying to achieve. In this situation I had an extremely rare opportunity to photograph endangered monk seals, so I shot many different compositions.