I don't think many people would argue the fact that we see the world through two incredible organs planted inside our skulls i.e. our eyes. That is of course something the whole of humanity and most of the animal kingdom has in common. How we interpret this visual information we receive though, appears to be determined by an incredibly complex mesh of factors - personality, outlook, society, time in history etc. It's a huge organic list like an equation that has no short or finite answer.

What we focus on from moment to moment, where we choose to rest our gaze, affects our understanding and filters our experience, steering our attention from moment to moment. In effect we are continually "framing" our experience.

Now take the mechanical eye that human creativity brought into the world in its recent history - the camera, and for the duration of this article I am referring to the stills camera. This camera for 150 years or so has been focussing and recording our gaze on the things we value - from family, events, products, people, and history. It has partially framed a great deal of our world and its unfolding. While our eyes change their framing from moment to moment, and then consign those images to the rather unreliable archive or our so called "memory", the cameras frame has preserved moments frozen in time unchanging for subsequent generations. Some of those "frames" have become iconic. Images of famous faces framed by the like of David Bailey, Richard Avedon, Duffy. Images of conflict from Vietnam to the Omaha Beach landings by photographers such as Robert Capa and Philip Jones Griffiths, to street scenes and intimate portraits of everyday life framed by the eyes of Robert Doisneau and Cartier-Bresson. Professionals who were there, who have "framed" a memory for us.

The ability of these professionals to compose a photograph in an interesting dynamic meaningful and lasting way is why they were paid to do what they did, and they did it elegantly with technique not necessarily technology. Certainly the technology today makes it much easier for the average casual photographer to take a better photograph, but it is this ability to frame and interpret that is still worth paying for.

As a professional London wedding and portrait photographer myself, I am paid to use my human eyes and interpretations to "frame" people, places, events, products. This framing of a moment in a person's life through the camera HAS to be more than they could achieve themselves, it has to be MORE than a competing photographer three streets away can do. To this end, and often without realising over the last few years I have tried to close the gap between what I see with my own eyes and what the camera would frame. What you can frame of course depends on the focal length choices of the lens you use i.e how wide or how "tele" it is, and the aperture that you use to determine the depth of field i.e what is in and out of focus. In a world of zoom lenses where a frame can quickly go from tight to wide the average user may consider these factors to be not that important. But for the professional wedding and portrait photographer like myself, who will often used fixed focal length prime lenses for a better quality and more artistic look, what is included or excluded from the frame is critical. The only zooming possible with these lenses is by moving backwards and forwards with your feet! To be continued.

To see examples of our wedding and portrait portfolios and also to read more about the working life of London Wedding and Portrait Photographers please visit our websites at: http://www.bigday-weddings.com/ and our portrait work at http://www.peopleportraits.co.uk/