Composition, Elements and Framing

The above photo looks like an interesting story. Why is she hiding from her upset father? Is that really her father, how much trouble is she going to get into when he finds her? What did she do to upset him?

However, the above stories would all be wrong. The power of cropping the image in the way I did isolates to just these two people in the photo which creates a connection between them. As the viewer, we try to fill in that connection with a story. In actuality there was no connection, the girl was part of a school group and the man just happened to walk up the stairs and look around.

I setup to take a shot there because I liked the shark jaws above and people would walk up the dark stairs and into the bright room and take a second to orient themselves. It wasn’t until looking at them afterwards that I noticed the above composition.

Here is the original photo not cropped, which you can see the other children and part of the group she was with.