The Art Of Cropping-The Before

It takes guts to crop - you have to throw away everything that doesn't make the image stronger. It doesn't matter how interesting the cropped material is - if it doesn't strengthen the image, it has to go. Ideally that process should happen when you shoot rather than later in the darkroom or on the computer.

In the case above, you are looking at the output from PTGui. Since I wanted to choose where to blend the falling water, the output was in layers and no attempt to match brightness was made by the software. Although exposures were the same, the edge falloff and uneven cropping of the two images results in the dark seam (most of the right hand image was included, only half of the left hand image so the middle of the picture is actually the left hand end of the right hand picture and is therefore suffereing fall off.

Anyway, back to the issue of cropping. You will note that the above image includes a lot more than the cropped black and white version of the previous post. What I noticed first was an asymmetry - the right side bottom is very white, the left upper side dark. This bothered me. Next I noted that while the fine patterns of water on the right are nice, the far right isn't as interesting. I decided to crop the far right and much of the bottom out.

While this meant cropping out some lovely icicles on the left lower part of the image - see above for 'if it doesn't strengthen the image...', it had to go.