Windows can be looked at, looked through and, depending on how high above the ground, looked into. But most of all, because that is their main visual function, they are looked out of.

The many shapes and sizes of windows provide an amazing variation to the blinkered vision you can often find yourself with. These different sizes are like the different angles of view that you can change at will on your cameras, by attaching lenses of different focal lengths... although lenses of 20mm or wider can hardly be said to blinker vision when they provide a captured, or framed, expanded field-of-view for the eye.

Looking in one direction the human eye, unlike the camera’s eye, has a constant view... although the brain can concentrate on a selected detail within that view. It is by moving backwards or forwards that you can alter the size relationship of, for example, a window in a wall, and correspondingly the view if any outside. By changing from one focal length to another you can do this without moving your own position. By both doing this and moving you can add another dimension and your perception of the subject can change. This facility has many possibilities... use them to advantage!

When composing images of windows the results will always be very different from inside than out. The geometric view beyond the silhouetted frame from inside a room can almost be viewed as “negative” compared with the “positive” view of a window that shows all its detail, colour and shape but nothing of the dark void beyond... in the interior. If the interior is lit then it may be seen almost as plainly as the outside... so there is a third dimension. When there is semi-darkness beyond the window it acts as a mysterious mirror... one of imperfect depth reflecting some forms, not others, and often distorting that which is visible.

Actually, the window has a unique place in the short history of photography... not only did William Henry Fox Talbot produce the first photograph from a proper negative in 1835 of a window in his study at Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, but Nicéphore Niépce made the first chemically formed picture in 1826 from a window of his workroom at Gras à Saint-Loup-de-Varennes in France.

As our methods of recording are far simpler to achieve more than a century-and-a-half on, there is no excuse not to explore this everyday object and subject... and instead of looking through from inside or outside, look at the glass and how its imperfections make the reflected world a different place visually... window glass is rarely clean and clear; striations, smudges, raindrops and bottle-glass bubbles may mar its appearance but they transform the view.

Also behind nearly every window are the means of blocking out the light... blinds, shutters, curtains, drapes, nets, rollers and screens all introducing an additional element into photographic compositions and exploration of windows as a subject. The combination is similar to a camera... the window being the lens and the curtain the shutter. One draws or forms the image... the other controls the amount of light. So simple... so easy to do... but if you need further help and inspiration there are plenty of Creative Photography books available.