A Dawn Colorfest

[RSL]

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[Eric Myrvaagnes]

This may be my favorite (so far) of your landscapes.
Well seen and executed.

[graeme]

This may be my favorite (so far) of your landscapes.
Well seen and executed.

+1

[mistymornings99]

A lovely combination of colours and textures, with very pleasing lighting. I find there are some areas in the top third that distract me a little e.g. the foliage coming in from the right; I wonder if a crop would simplify it a little.

[luxborealis]

This may be my favorite (so far) of your landscapes.
Well seen and executed.

+2

A lovely combination of colours and textures, with very pleasing lighting. I find there are some areas in the top third that distract me a little e.g. the foliage coming in from the right; I wonder if a crop would simplify it a little.

David, It seems you haven't yet been schooled on "Russ's Rules" of cropping: Cropping = Anathema

[RSL]

Thanks Terry. I can see that David's from the "It ain't finished 'til it's been cropped" school of photography.

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

A crop will always simplify an image. It will seldom improve it if the photographer has paid attention while shooting.

[graeme]

A crop will always simplify an image. It will seldom improve it if the photographer has paid attention while shooting.

I usually crop my images slightly simply because I don't particularly like the native proportions of the 35mm format.

I also expect to lose a tiny bit from the extreme edges of the image because of lens corrections, straightening, perspective correction etc. ( Which is why it doesn't bother me that my camera's viewfinder has less than 100% coverage ).

But I do agree that it's not good to habitually rely on cropping as a fix.

[RSL]

Hi Graeme, I'm pretty sure you've read some of my other comments where I've made it clear I'm not an HCB perfectionist, willing to bypass a good picture because it doesn't happen to fit the Leica's 3 to 2 aspect ratio, imposed on Oskar Barnack because the camera he designed used movie film.

But there are other formats. Nowadays I prefer the four-thirds format I have in my Pen-F, but during the sixties and seventies I spent enough time on the street with my Leicas that I began to see in B&W and a 3/2 aspect ratio. The time to crop is when you're looking through the viewfinder, but it's okay to decide during composition that you're going to crop when the format of your camera doesn't fit what you're after. On the other hand, the decision to crop should be an exceptional case.

Since your viewfinder doesn't cover 100% and you're composing (cropping) in the viewfinder I'd expect you to remove a bit around the edges -- the part that falls outside the viewfinder. Camera raw makes excellent lens corrections by the way, so I wouldn't crop because of that.

Bottom line: you're right. It's not good to bang away and hope to find something worthwhile on your computer monitor with a crop. But an awful lot of people do exactly that.

[James Clark]

Hmmm.  There's a word of space between banging away hand hoping to later isolate something worthwhile somewhere in the frame, and strategic cropping once you see an image full size in order to better present the image as you envisioned it, I think.

[RSL]

Hmmmmmmm. . . . If you didn't "envision" it properly in the viewfinder, and then "better envision it" when you see it "full size" (meaning you didn't see it full size before you raised the camera) then that's called "screwing up" -- also known as "banging away."

[Jeremy Roussak]

It's just fine as it is.

Jeremy

[farbschlurf]

I agree this one stands out even against your other good pictures. The textures, almost without any depth doesn't make it an easy to view picture, but once you dive into it there's a lot to see. Actually another one of those pictures I'd love to see real large ...

[mistymornings99]

I seem to have lifted the (seemingly very well worn) lid on a can of worms!

There are a number of reasons for cropping that wouldn't come under my description of banging away... aspect ratio changes, constrained viewpoint with use of fixed focal length lenses for example. But I get the point here. And it really is fine as it is presented.