> just having a quick look at your shots on > Sunday photog, you have a perfect example of the kind of crop I do for > people shots. In your article on flare (the first one I cam across with > people shots when looking back) there is one titled mj-morgan. If you > cropped that from landscape to portrait (eg crop what you have to > 250*339 pixels centred) then you have a much better shot. You lose his > bisected friend on one side and the wasted space on the other. This is > the sort of 50% crop that I do due to poor composition when I should > have shot in portrait mode to start with... > > You may not crop, but perhaps you should?
Rob, The thing was, that was an example picture to show flare...what I would do in that case is simply not print that picture. The way to do it with 35mm is, to me, to move around the subject and shoot a lot. So if I were really "after" a picture of those kids, I would have shot twenty pictures of them, or forty, including some verticals as you describe. And then I would have looked at all the negs, picked one, and printed it full-frame. To me, a picture either works or it doesn't. "Rescuing" half-assed shots by trying to crop them into something a little stronger than you saw when you were shooting is, in my experience, a fool's errand. Meaning, it's just not a very good strategy for getting good pictures. That's not a principle, it's just experience talking. That said, I do admit that I like "loose" and "open" compositions. I don't even like pictures that _look_ like they've been cropped. That's not a judgment, mind you, just personal taste. So a lot of the pictures I consider "good" don't look very tightly or "strongly" composed. Again, that's just me--I'm not trying to say my way is better than anyone else's. For instance, here's a picture of Donna Ferrato's I really love: http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0205/donna07.htm You might say that it should be cropped to "tighten it up" but man, I wouldn't crop that picture for all the tea in China. (Isn't that just the greatest hand? I love that.) Here's a Peter Turnley shot some people might say should be cropped: http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0212/pt28.html But again, I just wouldn't want to lose that shadow on the left, or the long line of the desert horizon. Here's a picture of Johnny Deadman's that some might say should be tighter, or a vertical, but that I like the way it is: http://www.pinkheadedbug.com/portfolios/goodfriday/pages/009.html Another aspect of this is that sometimes I just don't think crops help, in that they're finicky but just unnecessary. Take this picture by Tina Manley, for instance: http://main.nc.us/openstudio/tinamanley/Russia/paper.htm Now, you could argue that the foreground just isn't needed and that the picture is just as strong if cropped up from the bottom a little. I won't argue that. I also can't argue that the bottom of the frame adds anything. It doesn't, really. But I guess my position is that it doesn't matter either way, and, since the foreground is in the picture that Tina saw through her viewfinder when she took it, why get rid of it? It really doesn�t matter to the picture one way or the other, so why by finicky--just show us the whole picture and move on. Which might be a slightly doctrinaire position, but it's more or less the way I feel. --Mike
