Bird Market
The Making Of My First Extended Frame Photograph
Can you share your story about the origins of Bird Market? (0 - 0.59)
This photograph, titled Bird Market, is the first Extended Frame™ photograph that I ever made. It came about in 2017 when I was diligently focused on trying to find my own unique voice. I have been a street photographer since picking up a camera at 16, and I've always put photographs together - even in college. In 2017, I was really working with my street photographs and I started to place them next to each other. In doing so, the photos began to fit together like a puzzle; flowing and connecting to create an entirely new story.
The photograph of the gentleman in the bird market with the parrot perched on the stand had sat in my Lightroom catalog for four years. I knew it could be a special photograph, I just thought it needed something more. So, when I put these three photographs together, I felt their connection. I let them rest overnight. The next morning, I woke to see the photograph before me and I felt like I had hit upon a new way for me to speak. And this is how Bird Market and then my Extended Frame photographs began.
What do you like about creating Extended Frame photographs? (0.59 - End)
What I like about creating the Extended Frame photographs is that they take the viewer on a new journey. It’s kind of like the experience of reading a picture book.
Creating these new realities through Extended Frame photographs is a very organic process. Sometimes I feel like a photograph needs to have more than just that single frame moment. But, I may not have the other photographs in my catalog that actually could make that photograph more interesting or resonate to tell a bigger story. That was very much the case for Bird Market.
The three photographs that are incorporated weren't even in the same part of the city of Hong Kong! However, despite the different venues, there is a consistent color palette, which makes the photograph feel more complete. Across these photographs there is color, line, shape, texture, the unexpected. All these little elements make photographs that prompt the viewer to want to look a little bit longer and hold their attention.
We can look at the man's legs on the left-hand side, all the way down on the corner of the alleyway. When you look there, you see just his crossed legs and if his legs weren't there, weren’t crossed in that matter of fact way, then the photograph would be incredibly boring. But, just that hint of a person in the left-hand corner of the photograph brings life to it. So, in every photograph, every element - the bird, the parrot looking just off of center, the man very focused on his work - comes together to create a fuller experience for the viewer and makes the photograph more alive.
Another thing that’s quite fun about making Extended Frame photographs is knowing that when the viewer looks at them they may or may not register that it’s a combination of 2, 3, 4, or even 5 photographs that make up the photograph they're looking at. And when they find out that they're looking at more than one photograph, it's not a panoramic either. It's not an existing scene. It is something new. Real and unreal. With this realization, I then feel that viewers get to engage even more with the photograph than they would have previously. It’s really quite fun!
The process of creating Extended Frame photographs resonated with me from the beginning, a process that tells a bigger story - my own story of my feelings about where I walk and how I see things. This is the story of Bird Market.
