Cropping | Time and Time Photographer

Aug01 5

The Photography Tip of the Week #072

Posted by Philip in Photo Philosophy, Photo Processing, Photo Technique, Podcast

The land of Crop-a-lot

There is whole discussion one could have on cropping focused solely on whether one should crop or not. That discussion would go into whether you should use cropping as a way of making a photo better verses getting it framed properly in camera. This isn’t that discussion.

We are going to assume that you do crop and you have a need to crop your image. Those needs often fall into one of the following situations:

1) You want to create an image that will be the right size or aspect ratio for you final output. This is by far the most common reason for cropping. You can’t force your camera to make an image in camera that’s the perfect aspect ratio or final pixel size of the intended use. And you probably wouldn’t want a camera that did that in the first place. Even if you did know exactly what and where the image’s final destination, doing absolutely everything in camera is a bit silly and counter productive since most likely you’ll need the photo a different size.

Cropping for aspect ratio

2) The second most often reason for cropping is to get rid of something in the image, be it extra people, vehicles or your light stand with the umbrella protruding into the frame. These are things that were never meant to be in the image in the first place, but for some reason you couldn’t get them out of the way or you just didn’t see them there when you pushed the shutter button.

Crop unnecessary info

Most people think that’s these are only two reasons for cropping but there is a third:

3) The third reason for cropping is to correct the angle of the image. So you think correcting the angle of the image isn’t cropping? You may be right, but cropping does occur when you fix the angle of the photo so everything isn’t sliding off the end. This may be unnecessary information in your image, but it’s still cropped.

Crop to fix angle

You know three reasons why you crop, but when should you crop? I find so many photographers crop their images before they even color correct them. This is a big mistake. You want to keep as much information in the image during any editing before you crop. Cropping should be the very last operation you perform before sending the photo to print or sizing it for the web. As many new photographers find out rather quickly, if you don’t crop your images before you send them to print, the printer will automatically crop or put borders on your prints, and that just doesn’t look very professional.

Jun27 0

The Photography Tip of the Week #067

Posted by Philip in Photo Processing, Podcast

Some place to go

067 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

Occasionally you will take a photo that you really want to recompose. These are often when you have your subject in the dead center of the frame. There’s nothing wrong with having the subject in the center of the frame, but depending on the image it may lack interest. Simply recomposing the photo will make it much better. But if you didn’t do it in the field, you’ll have to do it in post. This is the one benefit of high megapixel cameras, the ability to crop an image without losing the shot. Below is a photo I took where I liked the overall look, but it seemed to be missing that little bit extra to make it a truly nice photo.

Original Image of Mother and Son walking on the beach

With this image there are so many possibilities for cropping, but in most cases you will want to use the rule of thirds for recomposition. The rule of thirds simply put says to place your subject on a horizontal or vertical line one third in from the edge. But for this image there are still many possibilities. I have two of which shown in blue and red. We could even change the aspect ratio to landscape, but for this we’ll leave it portrait.

A couple possible crops for the photo

So what is one to do? Which crop is the best. Well you need to look at what story are you trying to tell with your subject. For this type of portrait, is it “some place to go” or “where have we been?” For a nice stroll on the beach I think some place to go is more important. It speaks to the future instead of the past. So I want to have more photo in front of them instead of behind. And I’ll choose a crop close to the red option. Many times your image will have a very obvious crop once you decide. If not keep your thirds line either through the eyes or through the body. With two people in the photo like this, I’ll keep a line through the eyes since the eyes are on the same level and the vertical line between the people with the edge going down their side. This mimics the crop of the image as if I was cropping in tight.