Focusing Attention

On Photo Images - crop away...

Now that we've learned a little bit about cropping, I decided to practice using the images I already have. These are photos of plants around my house, my mom's hobby is gardening so there's quite a lot of plants for me to capture. Some of these I was going to throw away or delete because they were not pleasing to my eyes..lucky I haven't, there's beauty in these pictures I didn't know were there, brought out by cropping.

These purple leaves on the right are from a hanging plant, I was attracted to the color [I love purple]. I focused on the clearest part of the image, I guess it has something to do with the DOF [depth of field?] of the camera I'm using...but better not get into that, I might be wrong, I 'll get more info first. Hmm... I like the cropped image better. Oh yes, this purple plant's name is Zebrina pendula or inch plant, from the family of Commelinaceae. [sorry this pic is a bit blurred,couldn't find another..]

On the picture on the left, it's hard to know the cropped result was taken from the picture below left . I saw a shinny leaf on top left and decided to focus on it. Ok. That's about the plants, let's get back to the subject of cropping. Here's some more info from digital-photography-school.com :

Things to consider when cropping :

-duplicate your images first. It’s always good to keep an original that you can go back to later to find a different way to crop.

-take your time when cropping. There are almost unlimited ways to crop an image and it’s worth trying a few of them before settling on one.

-if you change the shape of your image this could make printing more difficult, especially if you’re going to a photo lab which generally only print in standard shapes and sizes.

-cropping works best when you’re starting with a fairly large image. When you crop an image and then try to view it at the same size as it was before you cropped you’ll notice that the pixels are large. If you’re using small images keep this in mind or you’ll notice the quality of your images can decrease to an unusable level.

- for this reason the ideal is to use cropping as a fine tuning of a well framed picture. With experience you’ll find your framing of images gets better and you’ll probably find yourself cropping drastically in post production less and less.

The endless possibilities of cropping :

-take a group photo of friends and crop it down to one or two people
-take a shot of a table set for a dinner and focus in on one of the dishes or an element of the table setting [ Oh ! I have one of this...but not through cropping ]

-take a shot of a garden and crop down to focus upon a plant or flower [don't think my camera's strong enough for this, or is it?...]
-take a street scene and focus in on a sign

...and much more...

Okay, I'll end my cropping and plant ramblings here, with the hope you got something from this post. I'm no expert but I'd like to learn more. Photography was not a hobby before joining the BYJ family...but now I see why YJ loves this hobby, it's so mezmerising...he he he....Btw, this last plant is called Aoenium sp from the family of Crassulaceae.