Euphoria by Euphorbia

On Images - to crop or not to crop

Ok. I can crop now..YaaaY ! Just as well, I still have lots of images from my neighbor's garden that aren't that great...I mean, the flowers are great but the photographer is not. I do not do those beautiful flowers justice. I heard that cropping could add beauty to our images...no doubt about it, I must master cropping, coz my images need all the help they can get !

I read in kodak.com that Sometimes cropping a picture can improve it dramatically. Cropping can also be used to enlarge the main subject and eliminate things that distract attention from the subject. To find more info on cropping, I went to digital-photography-school.com and found these useful information :

Even the best photographers will often get back to their computers to view their photos and find that their composition is not ideal for one reason or another including distracting background elements, framing mistakes, unbalanced images etc.

Cropping images can be used in some of the following ways:

Covering Framing Mistakes

One common problem that face digital photographers are shots that have one side of your subject very close to the edge of the frame, or even have it chopped off by the frame. This can leave the shot feeling quite cramped, incomplete or uneven. For example when taking a portrait and you slightly clip the ear of your subject. [myoce : Oh ! that's only an ear, I chopped a whole head off :( ].

While you can never really add to the photograph to put more space around your subject (or recover the ear you clipped), cropping the image even tighter can take the focus away from the clipped part of your subject and make the image quite dynamic [myoce : in other words, clip the other ear too ! ].


Finding Balance

Another problem that cropping images can help address is the unbalanced image. For example a shot where you attempted to put your subject in the dead centre of your shot but where it ended up being slightly off centre [myoce : my subject-the donkey-was dead centre....too bad it was the wrong end of it ! ] .

Editing Distractions

There’s nothing worse than thinking you’ve taken the ‘money shot’ and getting home to view your image to find that somewhere in the background of your image there is a distracting element that you’d not seen when framing your shot. Cropping can solve this problem in some instances - particularly when the distraction is on the edges of your image.

Finding New Formats

Sometimes the problem with an image is that the format you’ve chosen to shoot it in (ie how you’ve held the camera, vertically or horizontally) is just wrong for the image.

While you can retain the shape of your image with cropping you can also change it considerably moving it from a horizontal framing to a vertical one or the other way around.

Also in this way you can move into some non standard image sizes if it adds to your shot. For example sometimes cropping an image into a square can add impact or cropping the top and bottom of a horizontal shot into a panoramic one can have a dramatic impact also. Experiment with different shapes of images to see what works best.

Going Abstract

Quite often cropping is just a matter of trimming the edges of an image but being bold and tightly cropping images to focus in on different elements within an image can also result in some interesting and often abstract results. [myoce : hmm..what part of the donkey's behind should I crop to make it into an 'abstact work of art'?]

Hope these were useful for you !