Review: "Find Your Frame" by Craig Whitehead

Find Your Frame by Craig Whitehead
Published September 2023 via Frances Lincoln
★★★

In Find Your Frame, Whitehead takes readers through some of the things he looks for when working as a street photographer. You can get a sense just from the cover what sorts of images he's attracted to—bold, tightly framed, making use of angles and built-in borders.

It's a very non-technical book, better suited to lay readers or beginning photographers than to (for lack of a better term) working street photographers. Whitehead's emphasis begins on, and circles back to again and again, finding the shot—not on focus or lighting or color correction or aperture or...I'm not a professional and I've run out of technical terms, so I suppose I'll leave it there, but in any case, if the book wants you to work on anything, it's training your eye to think how you might frame a particular shot, and then having the patience to wait for all the necessary elements in the photo to line up. Less about taking the shots and more about finding them, I suppose.

Whitehead talks quite a bit about shots that don't become the final version of the picture—e.g., when you shoot twenty frames of the same thing, but only one of them ends up being published—and I wish that more of those images had been included in the book; seeing the rejected or second-best shots, or perhaps more of the surrounding area that was cropped out, feels like a lesson in and of itself.

It all sort of begs the question of how much photographic "eye" can/should be trained and how much is more innate—I'd love to send a few beginner photographers out into the world with this book as their inspiration and see whether they gravitate to similar or very different shots—and I can't answer that, but if you enjoy Whitehead's photographic style this makes for an eye-catching coffee-table book.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.