Exploration becomes possible when we expand the timescale a notch up from a pure reaction situation. While you could justifiably argue that reactive photography is a kind of fast exploration, when there is more time, as in these examples, more coherent thought is possible.

There are different types of exploration. One is when the subject is a clearly defined physical object and there is time enough to move around it, or move it around, looking for different angles, lighting, and so on. This commonly happens in still-life photography, but also, as in the example opposite, with any kind of discrete physical object such as a building, or a person. Another is when the general subject is a place and the photographer travels around it, and the area can range greatly in size from, say, a garden to a national park. A third is when a localized situation occurs over a period of time a prolonged event, in other words and this could be, for example, a football game, a street demonstration, or a ceremony of some kind. We could categorize these if we wished, into physical, spatial, and temporal, although there is plenty of opportunity for overlap; in the case of the windmill, partly physical, partly spatial.

The means for exploring range even more widely, and potentially draw on all the compositional methods that we have already examined. The viewfinder, or in the case of many digital cameras, the LCD screen, is the primary tool, and one of the most common, and...