Malcolm Smith wrote: >David Mann wrote: > >> We're cropping reality every time we take a photo. > >Mark! > >However: this is also a great observation that is often overlooked. Aside >from choosing the specific image of the area I am in, I now find myself in >the digital age drawn to cropping from the original I've taken. I often >wonder if that is because I can, simply due to the large image size, and I >can take another look at the image (I often leave photos a week or two and >come back to them fresh in LR or Elements), or I didn't frame the subject >taken well enough? Maybe both? Or is it simply as I originally suggested, >because I can?
I'm of two minds when it comes to cropping: First of all, refusing to crop when it's obvious that doing so will result in a better final image is just cutting off your nose to spite your face it might make you feel morally superior but it makes you look foolish to everyone else; but on the other hand I do hate to throw away resolution, which is an inevitable part of cropping (don't waste precious pixels!) So on the whole, I crop when I have to and avoid it when I can. In more practical terms, though, I feel that cropping should be used as an educational tool. Whenever I end up cropping an image I kick myself mentally and analyze *why* I composed the shot the way I did and what's better about the cropped version. Accumulating this knowledge over the years has really reduced the number of times I'm forced to resort to cropping. In other words, done right, cropping is a tool that teaches you how to not need to crop future photos. -- Mark Roberts - Photography & Multimedia www.robertstech.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
