Nearly every photograph I kept from Kathmandu is a letterbox: a wide, shallow frame with the top and bottom taken off. It was not how they were shot. It is how they were finished, and I made the same decision often enough that it stopped being a decision and became the way I was seeing that week.
Why wide
A square in a city is a horizontal thing. People cross it from side to side. Birds go up and come down, but they travel across. The full-height frame gives you a lot of building above and a lot of paving below, and neither of them is what you are looking at.
Cut the frame down and two things happen. The eye starts travelling left to right instead of settling in the middle, and every figure in the picture has to earn its place, because there is no room for anything that is only filling space.
The square
This is the plaza around the Boudhanath stupa: a white dome, a gold spire, prayer flags running off it in every direction, and several hundred pigeons living on the roofs around the edge.
One thing the post should say out loud. The woman in these frames was not a stranger passing through. This was a portrait session during the workshop, and the birds were put up on purpose, which is why she is looking where she is looking. She was glad to be photographed: she and her husband were pleased enough with the pictures that they bought us dinner that evening, which is not something that happens when you photograph strangers from across a square. She is not named here.
The birds there are used to people and go up in one mass when somebody claps or a child runs. You get perhaps two seconds of wings at head height and then it is over, and the timing is not the hard part.
The hard part is having decided beforehand what the picture is of. A hundred pigeons is not a subject. One person in a hundred pigeons is.
What the crop leaves out
It leaves out the sky, which in Kathmandu is usually white and adds nothing. It leaves out the temple roofs, which are the reason many people come, and which I have therefore cut out of my own photographs of the place. It leaves out scale.
That is a real loss and worth stating. A wide crop makes an ordinary frame look considered, and it is worth asking, every time, whether the picture is better or merely more stylish.
Where I learnt it
This trip was a photography workshop, led by William Chua. What he pressed on us was simple to say and harder to do: look at the light first, and photograph the emotion and the activity around you rather than the thing you came to see.
In a square like this one, that is the whole difference. The birds are the spectacle, and the spectacle is the easy picture. The woman walking through them, the man watching her, the light coming off the paving between the two of them — that is the photograph, and the wide frame is only the shape that holds it.
One note on what is not in this post. The set also contains frames from a cremation ground. Those are not here, and they will not be used for anything, which is a decision I am comfortable explaining and not one I am going to argue about.
The full Nepal set is on SmugMug.