Chez Spud

Way back in the mists of time, someone asked me to do a Camera Club post on cropping and what better way to pass the time whilst laid up in bed with a flu ‘thing’ than a wee Camera Club meeting?  Do we have cake?  I’ve heard rumours of baking lessons at Blog Camp 3.0. I think I’ll be the Quality Control Bleeper because me and baking don’t get along too well. I digress.

So, there are two reasons to crop your photos (1) to improve the composition and (2) to prepare them for print. Let’s focus on composition though because the print thing is quite dull and technical, we’ll leave that until last. I think I must have got better as composing my photos ‘in camera’ as time has gone on, as I find that I crop my photos less these days than I did a year ago.  I’ve learnt the hard way that filling the frame with my subject works best, and applying the rule of thirds whilst composing the shot is a whole lot less hassle than cropping as part of processing them.

Sometimes I crop to zoom in more on the subject, and to take out any distracting elements. The shot at the top of this post looked like this SOOC (Straight Out Of the Camera):

I was trying to get a photo of Miss Violet Blush’s funky hotpants, but it’s a bit distracting with her dad’s face in the picture too. So I cropped it hard (that means I took a lot of the original image out) and then processed it to give it a desaturated, vintagey kind of feel. Interestingly, it breaks one of the ‘rules’ of composition which is that you should never chop limbs off. It’s fine to slice the top, and bottom, of heads off…but not limbs. I think it works better in the final image, perhaps because the ‘amputation’ is quite high above her knees. Looks very strange in the original image.

I took this image in Paris. It’s not great, it’s not quite in focus and the composition is awful. I was trying to capture the two people on the bench, strangers but mirroring each other perfectly but I felt self-conscious and rushed it:

A very hard crop and black & white conversion and it’s looking a lot better, although not really as I’d like:

Here’s an example of head/face chopping slasher style.  Bertie, SOOC…I like the rather wistful expression on his face but I should have got in closer. The wall behind him isn’t doing anything helpful for the composition and his red T shirt is quite distracting. By the way, all my SOOC images look ‘flat’ like this because I shoot in RAW. Hmmm do we need a RAW v JPEG Camera Club meeting? Ponders.

So, I cropped it hard to focus on his left eye and that sweet lock of hair. I also removed the cake crumbs, fixed the white balance and fiddled with the exposure/brightness to make it more glowy. This is the final image:

Sometimes I like to square crop images, although this works better with some subjects than others. It’s a bit trial and error! I think it works well with these shells as they entirely fill the frame, and it’s an interesting contrast between the square frame and curved elements of the shells.

When I posted that shot on Flickr alot of people said, ‘Nice macro’. But it isn’t a macro shot, I don’t have a macro lens. But a tight crop like this gives the impression of a macro. Cunning huh? Here’s the original. I knew I’d have to crop this, I was using my 50mm lens because the light was poor and it has a huge maximum aperture. BUT, it can’t focus any nearer than about 45cm from any given object. The original image is pretty dire actually. Another reason to crop: to get a usable image out of a disaster!

It was this image of my presents for Blog Camp 1.5 that provoked the request for a Camera Club meeting on cropping. Again, it’s a very hard crop and is macro like:

The original image was ok but a bit ‘lumpy’, but I wanted to crop it because I didn’t want the Blog Campers to guess what their present were! I think it’s quite obvious from this photo that they are notebooks (which they were, Grudge Books in fact). So I cropped to disguise!

Here’s my sister-in-law demonstrating me making a very common mistake, composing a portrait with too much space above the subject’s head.  She looks ‘lost’ in all that green, plus it’s underexposed as she was sitting under an umbrella and the camera metered incorrectly. It’s a pretty rubbish picture, poorly composed and poorly exposed.

Ta da! Bit of cropping, bit of a fix to the exposure/brightness/vibrance…much better.

I wanted a really abstract image for a post a while back, so I took this image:

And cropped that little circle of light and made this:

One thing to be aware of before we move on to cropping for printing (and it’s related to printing too): when you crop your image you are losing pixels, which means you are losing quality/sharpness.  Generally a cropped image viewed on screen will be absolutely fine, but if you print an image that has been very hard cropped you may well end up with a slightly fuzzy/blurry image. Just a warning.

So, cropping for printing. I came across this fabulous blog post about how to work around the problem of your prints coming back with bits cropped off or with white edges! To make life easy for myself, if I’m cropping an image I want to print I keep to a 2:3 ratio as I nearly always print 6″x4″.

I leave you with this. Cropped scones…yum…cropped in to my tummy please….

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