Project: Quiet places, busy places

Firstly looking at a figure as an accent:
Pulling back out of the frame so that people appear small doesn't necessarily make them appear insignificant, but rather shows them in a different context. A tiny figure standing or walking through a large space may seem at first glance to be less of a portrait than a landscape containing a punctuation. Sometimes, such a picture is conceived exactly as this, but it is also an interesting and restrained way of establishing a connection between people and their wider surroundings, Such figure-in-a-landscape images work precisely because they pitch a small human being against a dominant location, so an extreme size relationship is key. And the figure must have sufficient contrast against the setting to be noticed. Typically, contrast is in the form of colour difference or tonal difference - dark against a light background or light against dark.

One thing with this kind of extreme composition, forced to abandon, is identity. At this scale there is not question of showing who the person is, unless the image is one of several in a picture essay. You are more likely to deliver a general description based on clothes and action - for example a farmer among fields, a worker in a large factory space. There may be an advantage to this kind of anonymity, in that it keeps attention more firmly on the location.