I actually agree with you pretty much in all of your examples. Sometimes we benefit from seeing the context around the subject. In fact sometimes the context IS the subject. The only one I might debate is the nun in venice. Personally I would try losing the person bisected by the frame on the left. I would leave it as open as possible though.
However, these are very different type of shots to the family portrait I made an example of. Yes, as you say, I would take plenty of shots, but you never know when kids are gonna give you the perfect expression and if you didn't have the camera in the right orientation that this happenned, then you can still make a nice picture out of it. This happens quite often with kids when they are running round and you don't always have time to orient optimally. Personally I would shoot the 40 or so pictures (and do often with my kids) and if they were all good shots they would all go in the album. This is because it is about memories, and about capturing my children in the nicest way, and if that means I choose between cropping and throwing away, I crop. Mind you, maybe that's why I have 25 albums (over 3000 pics) of my kids in the last 3 years!! > -----Original Message----- > From: Mike Johnston [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > Sent: 12 February 2003 01:33 > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Some examples of actual pictures, WAS: Hands up who crops? > > > > 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
