Cropping Photos
July 29th, 2009 Rob Sheppard
Cropping is an interesting topic. Cropping can be used to clean up problems with a photo, but it can also change the meaning of an image just as much as using Photoshop might. There is a story from the 1950’s about a politician accused of being friendly with communists, and a photo was displayed showing him happily posing with a group of known communists. The person starting this rumor evidently figured no one knew this obscure photo. The problem with this shot was that it had been cropped to remove General Eisenhower on one side. It was only a casual snapshot after WWII, and cropping the photo turned it into a lie.
That’s a bit extreme. Most of the time cropping is used simply to tighten up a composition or to make it work in a specific location, such as on a page in a magazine where it could not fit if not cropped. Most of my images that fill a page or two pages in a book, for example, are cropped because the original format does not fit that page. The photo has to be cropped or else it will not fill the page properly. Some photographers do not like that, but as long as it does not destroy the original image, I have no problem with it. However, I do check layouts because sometimes a designer will over-crop an image, “removing Eisenhower” or some other important part of the image and I will bring that up with my editor. Usually, the crop is changed or a new photo used.
I don’t do a lot of cropping, and you will find that most pros don’t, either, but that is not a “moral” decision as some people would make it out to be. I think it is important to clearly see what is in front of you as you take the picture, to clearly see the image frame and its proportions, then to combine those in a fully used way. That means creating an image that fills the frame with important visual content.
Composition is not simply about where a subject is within the image area, but also about relationships, including relationships to the sides of the image. Those relationships are affected by the original frame and how you compose the image within that frame. The result is that a good composition fills that original frame with balance and unity so that the image seems right, that it communicates strongly within that frame. All of this is strongly affected by the choices you make when you squeeze the shutter. If you compose fully for the image area you see within your viewfinder, then your composition has a basic sort of integrity based on that specific frame. You can always do this with landscape and close-up photography because those subjects are not moving. The photo of the wild roses on Cape Cod is not cropped, but is the full size as originally shot with the camera. With practice, you can do this with wildlife and people action photography, too.
I will crop for four reasons:
- To get rid of junk. For example, I find that when I use my full-frame fisheye lens that it is so wide that it often picks up junk on the edges that I missed when shooting. This junk can be easy to miss because of the way this lens shows so much detail in the frame, detail hard to see well in the camera LCD.
- To get a specific print size.
- To work with a unique size, such as a panoramic frame or a square, for its own sake.
- To recompose the image to better define and present the subject. But I rarely do this not because the image is sacred, but because I have hopefully done my key composition work when I pressed the shutter. That is the only time that you can truly recompose a subject because at that point you can move around. Cropping can only get rid of stuff. Yet, like every photographer, sometimes I get excited about a subject and forget my training, so the subject gets too centered in the frame. I will usually crop such photos to get rid of the dullness that often comes from centered compositions.
Cropping is always subjective on one level. On the other hand, I think it is dangerous to start cropping based on “rules”, including specific dimensions. There are reasons for dealing with specific dimensions including a special use (such as a poster that is using a grid of images identically sized), printing for a specific size (especially for a frame or matte size), to fit a page in a publication, to fit a video format, and so forth. Then you need to frame the best you can for that size, both when taking the picture and when cropping.
