man & nature # 228 - 231 ~ chimp away
Clock Park AM fog • click to embiggen
AM fog ~ Au Sable Forks • click to embiggenI have always been somewhat confused / perplexed regarding the idea of post-picturing cropping. That notion was marching around in my cranium for a while yesterday as a result of reading a blog post wherein the author was mentioning that his new full-frame sensor camera allowed for a considerable amount of after-the-fact cropping while still maintaining a high degree of sharpness / detail / lack of noise and the like.
No doubt that that is true. But, my question is - if you feel the need to crop after-the-fact, where's the disconnect with that idea - cropping for better ... what? ... composition? - at the time one is picturing?
Or, to put it a slightly different way - if one of the principle characteristics of the medium of photography is the act of selection (and it is) why don't picture makers pay way more attention to that act while they are engaged in the act of picturing?
I am doubly perplexed regarding this question in the current digital age. I mean, for goodness sake, your camera has a screen on which to view your selection efforts on the spot. One can chimp away to one's heart's delight. Man, if you can't get it right with that help, once again, I might suggest taking up another time-killing sport other than picturing.
gravitas et nugalis
in man and nature, the forks
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7 Comments
Reader Comments (7)
I think that it goes down to the question of intentionality. More or less it is the same, old here, question as picturing a thing or picturing a view of the thing. In the latter case it make really no sense to chose a crop in post production (except to get to the intended framing).
I get your point, but there are many instances where cropping is a neccessity. When using a tele photographing storms or from a boat I will quite often struggle to get things level because of strong gusts of wind throwing me about or waves rocking the boat. In such situations I might level the horizon after the fact and loose 20% of the picture. With decent resolution those 20% won't be missed.
I say shoot, shoot, shoot, see the image, make the image, worry about cropping later.
When I shoot, I typically aim for the inner 80% of the frame knowing I will lose important info (to me) near the edges (top & bottom mostly... but the flanking images with lose left and right as well). My final panos before cropping will look like giant puffy cloud shapes with ripples along top and bottom. It's quite difficult to view a single frame on my LCD and pinpoint exactly what will stay around the periphery.
I believe Svein and I have two legitimate reasons for our own "aggressive cropping".
Yeah, and if you have crappy lenses with poor edge sharpness you might need to crop - NOT!
Just kidding, but I had to say sorry for the use of loose when I meant lose. Shame on me!
One thing that I would think would bother people about cropping to size rather than getting it right in-camera happens with the relationship of the apparent size of objects in the foreground vs. the background and the compression of apparent distance between foreground and background.
Just to be extreme, imagine you took a picture with a 24mm lens. This picture included a couple of people walking along a trail with trees behind them.
At the computer, you decide to crop the picture pretty closely, so that you're now seeing the field of view you would have gotten with a 135mm lens.
You're also going to have the same perspective as you would have had with the 135mm lens and so much of the front-to-back relationships that you would have seen through the viewfinder (when using a 24mm lens) is now completely changed. It's gone from something with an expansive sense of depth to one with the background pressed up against the people in the foreground.
Maybe I'm just not capable enough, but that's just far too much of a change for me to hold in my head and do deliberately.
Marvelous image. That's what I call a perfectly balanced configuration :)