The answer to this question depends on whether I'm shooting for myself (artsy stuff for which I can impose my own pretentious, anal-retentive standards...just like everyone else <g>) or for someone else.
For myself, I can recall only 2 photos that I've cropped in the past 10 years or so. Both were cases which combined two problems, the limited latitude of film itself, and the fact that the world doesn't always fit into a 2:3 aspect ratio. (Which makes it kind of remarkable that I've only had two instances in 10 years, but then learning to compensate for limitations of the technology is a lot of the "trick" of photography, isn't it?) One was a B&W shot of Cathedral Lake in Colorado; I really liked the shot, but there was a large area in the bottom of the frame that was too dark to be dodged out. Almost accidentally, I cropped the image down to a 2:1 aspect ratio and came up with a shot I *really* liked. The other was a color shot in Colorado that just didn't "work" for me until I cropped it into *square* format! I liked that largely because it seemed a little odd. When I'm shooting for someone else I'm much more open to cropping, especially if it's for the web. If I know the final product will be used on the web or printed at 5 x 7 or smaller, I'll compose a bit loose and crop if it seems advantageous later. I just did a whole project for my local organic food co-op and found I could get much more natural candid portraits if I kept farther away from the subjects and cropped later. Since the photos are for small prints and their web page, this worked well. -- Mark Roberts Photography and writing www.robertstech.com
