Friday, February 02, 2007

On Cropping

There's an interesting, and controversial discussion on cropping over at Luminous Landscapein which Michael wrote an article basically shaking his head at the oddity of people who don't crop, or even worse, who always crop to fit standard paper sizes. Uwe Steinmuller of Outback Photo has asked me to write an article on the 'Art Of Cropping' which I hope to develop over the next month or so, so I guess I'm going to be in the thick of it. Over the next little while, I'm going to throw out some of my ideas on the subject of cropping.

For now, let me just start by saying we all crop, we crop in the camera or we crop in the darkroom or we crop in the computer, but we crop - in the act of framing, we decide where the edges of our image go, and that's all this is about. Stay tuned for further 'radical' thoughts.

2 comments:

Billie Mercer said...

Cropping is not a mortal sin!

Gary Nylander said...

I think cropping is really a personal preference, each photographer has their own way of looking at things in terms of how they present their work , there is now right or wrong way. In my own case way back when I first started as a pup photographer at a weekly newspaper my boss handed me Henri Cartier Bresson's book the "Decisive Moment" and told me "here read this", now many will know that Bresson hated to crop his photos and like many photographers who are inspired by his work I never liked to crop my images, I always try to shoot for the "frame" but that doesn't mean I don't crop when I need to, when I shoot sports I crop my images all the time, its makes for better visual impact and a "tighter" image with less space around the players, news type images also get cropped quite often too.

For my personal fine art black and white work I like to do on my time off I never crop my images I always try to shoot full frame even back a few years ago when I had the square format Hassleblad. Okay I know, its sounds boring, but there are many accomplished photographers that have made many beautiful photographs shooting full frame and I'm sure that there are great photographers who have made images that they have cropped from the original file or negative. I think one of the keys to making a fine picture is to have some kind of idea when one is shooting an image in the field as to how the finished image might look, that way when working on the image on one's computer ( or in a darkroom ) that person will have some kind of sense of where they are going with their image instead of just guessing and hoping for the best.

My full frame images can be seen at my website: http://www.garynylander.com