Every photo has a context--I realised while watching people photographing all kinds of things that they are cropping--by position, zoom, or afterwards in their editing--to achieve something special--and that special has a context--so a picture of a castle on a hill--how to take it?  Click click (our camera goes woof--don't know why, we can't work out how to change it)--but....what's the context?  What I mean is, what is happening around a photograph such that elements are chopped out?

My example: I was standing on a bridge looking at a local brewery, I thought (I don't carry a camera) about what kind of photo I might take--how to capture--what?  The brewery (so the context would be: let's not show the viewer that bit of cement by the river); or I could go for a river shot, where the context might be "lose the factories, they're ugly"--or I could take a photo of the whole thing as a blank shot--"this is what it looks like"--

There are postcards from our town designed to be as...unphotoworthy as possible--terrible angles, subjects all out of sync with surroundings--and they worked well because that is often our daily experience: that the world contains all those elements the photo has chopped out--

--so "context"--what's missing?  What was taken out of the shot, and why?

(In my head it ties into the idea that photos are lies we tell, like films and theatre etc...)

heh....I no makea de sense again!

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.