The Bad With The Good

The first image is the one I posted yesterday. The second is a crop that Chuck thought I might be interested in looking at. He sent it to me with some reluctance as he himself isn't overly fond of getting crops in the mail, but I guess he felt this was sufficiently interesting to warrant the intrusion. As I too have cropped other people's images, usually not bothering to send them but occasionally doing so, he was on solid ground.

I too was taken with the tightly cropped image and thought I'd write about it.

I don't think there is anything wrong with the original image, but Chuck has managed to pare down the image to its essentials while eliminating some distracting details.

There is less plain brick wall - after all - how much brick do you need? He managed to eliminate the lights, which certainly had bothered me in the original composition. He's taken a horizontal image and turned into a vertical one with a lot of energy in it. He's managed to emphasize the looming side of the steps, eliminated the odd angles of handrails that distracted and also the white marks at the edge of the steps.

In return he lost some good features of the original and it's a question of whether it's better to remove some good to eliminate some bad, and whether in the end the new composition is simply better.

I actually went down to reshoot these steps today (I'm on an extended long weekend) but unfortunately much of downtown wasn't - no parking, too many people. I'll go again tomorrow, Canada Day and reshoot the image with tripod and HDR and adequate depth of field and low ISO, probably with the 1Ds2 for best possible resolution.

Can you use this example to help your own compositional efforts?

Below is my effort at cropping in the way of Chuck- it's actually shot from a slightly different position - you don't get the loom of the brick top to the stairs in the bottom right corner, but you do get that other shape which goes to the corner - it's going to be fun reshooting it and I think I will have to give myself several options for composition since making a final decision based on the small viewfinder isn't the best from prior experience.