Tip of the Day – Crop the Shot for More Drama

Wisconsin Winter [28 December 2012]

I’ve used short, wide images in the blog before.  I like how they look.  The essential subjects of the picture are reduced to a narrower, horizontal perspective.  There are cameras that are specialized to take panoramic images or settings on some cameras that will reduce the image to these dimensions. 

Yes, the new dimensions are not helpful for standard print paper and frames.  And, as I have said before (“Rule Number One”), it’s always best to make your best shot in the camera and not depend on the digital darkroom to make it all right.  It really is not good when you eliminate so much of the original file’s information.  But when you do, save the cropped image as a separate file and preserve the original.  What you’ve created is a new version and the original should remain intact.  If you’re going to use the trimmed picture in a document or online, there are enough pixels.  And it’s aesthetically pleasing...to me anyway.

You can also make panoramas by taking multiple, overlapping shots of a scene and using software to stitch them together.  That will be the subject of a later post.  This is about cutting away parts of a single shot to achieve a better look.

St. Croix River, Autumn Afternoon, Stillwater, MN [6 October 2007]

There was a lot of water between me and the gondola and the trees beyond the sunlit shore were uninteresting...so, I cut them out.  Understand that doing this eliminates a great percentage of the pixels in the file.  The shot is no longer one that can be turned into a sizable enlargement.  But it can be inserted in document and e-mails...which is all I expect from it.

Mono Lake, CA [14 May 2007]

Mono Lake is this relict, hyper-salty body of water on the arid, eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  Shot from a distance, there was lots of sky and foreground grassland in the picture.  I think the rough tufa formations along the lakeshore, the lake and the terrain beyond are the essential elements of the scene.  Since much of it is not very colorful, I finished the image in black and white.

Along I-55 in Illinois [16 June 2009]

This is another of those shots taken out of a moving car window.  I talked about this [some would say, sad] habit in a 2012 post.  Again, this is not fine art.  I’m just reducing a [literally] drive-by shot to something that has...to me...a more pleasing presentation.

Col. DeShield’s Salute, Arlington National Cemetery [16 August 2011]

I was far from the soldiers.  I could have zoomed in and filled the frame with them or kept this shot with uninteresting foreground grass, tree and sky.  Instead, I chose to reduce the scene to the gunners and headstones to emphasize the key elements.

 

Egret Roost, Audubon Park, New Orleans [23 June 2008]

The lagoon in Audubon Park is a popular place for birds.  This tree was blown over three years earlier by Hurricane Katrina.  They decided to leave it in place.  The egrets certainly don’t mind.

I’m guessing this tip is not really recommended by experts.  I have not seen it in print and it clearly reduces the size of the original image file.  What can I say?  It’s an easy way to create a dramatic image and if you’re not going to blow it up into a big print to frame, it works.