Exercise 14: Cropping

Cropping gives us a means of altering the composition of an image after it has been taken. In this exercise, the aim is to pick 3 previously taken photos and produce a new composition through cropping.

Welding: This is a photo taken back in 2009 with my old canon 350d and if I remember correctly I’d just picked up my first ever fast lens and was eager to play with the new toy. I didn’t really know what I was doing at the time and just aimed dead centre at from a little way back and took practically the same photo several times over. Lots of dead space and some distracting light around the edges of the door frame. They’ve just sat on the hard drive since forgotten until now.

I experimented with a square crop with the subject in the centre to start with but I found the composition to be quite boring. Going back to the original ratio, I cropped to roughly the height of the door and left a good deal of empty space to the right of the frame. I feel that with the subject positioned on the left, the eye takes a fairly natural path across the photo and given the constraints of the original photo, I’m pretty happy with the results.

Welding, original

Welding, cropped

Baboon:

A snapshot from my daughter’s first time at the zoo here. The baboon was walking from right to left but the central composition doesn’t really convey any much in the way of movement. By cropping away most of the background and positioning the baboon on the right there’s more of a sense of movement in the cropped version

Baboon, original

Baboon, cropped

Madeira Airport:

This photo is from our holiday back in October 2010. We were on a viewpoint looking over the airport. The original was taken to fit all of the visible airport in to the frame but a result is that there is quite a bit of rather boring empty space above and below. With a 1:3 ratio panoramic crop, the result is more pleasing with the runway dividing the frame and providing a natural line for the eye to follow. 

Madeira airport, original

Madeira airport, cropped

A few notes:

As demonstrated, cropping is a powerful that can be used to completely change a photograph if required. It can also be used remedially to correct for compositional errors although that’s obviously we should aim to avoid that situation.