To Crop or Not to Crop

Writing the 4 posts for the Newtown the Beautiful series took a lot out of me, so I will be writing very little today and in most of my posts this week. I will still be posting a daily photo unless something gets in the way of that.

 

Free Newtown Images

I mentioned at the end of the last post that I would be making the images from Newtown available for download.  You can get them here.

 

Cropping

Blog750_6_20120705-0147Cropping refers to removing unwanted areas from an image and depending on who you listen to, there are many viewpoints on the subject.  One of my favorite photographers to follow and listen to is Moose Peterson.  He has a great post on why he doesn’t crop here.  That’s right!  He doesn’t crop his images at all.

I often think about Moose’s philosophy when I photograph and edit.  Then I crop anyway if it suits me.  Why?  Because for me, it is a benchmark to attain, but it doesn’t stop me from making my final image as good as possible.  The downside to that is it limits what you can do with your final image.

The deer play fighting in a field happened so fast that I had one chance to turn the camera, focus and snap as many shots as I could before it was over a couple seconds later.  Unfortunately the little guy decided to take a pee right in front of the action and I was left with an unusable set of photographs.  That is until I cropped out the offending action.  I also made it a vertical image because after cropping the right side off, there was too much empty space over on the left.  I am much happier with the final image, which for me, is enough to say the cropping was justified.  But cropping doesn’t come without sacrifice and the final size of my image is much less than the original 16.2 mega pixels.  A large print goes out the window, but I wasn’t going to make a large print of the peeing deer either.

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Tomorrow?  One of my favs from Vermont and a little more on HDR.

 

 

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