...and Jonathan concedes this when he says it's sometimes "necessary" to make a few trims. Well, yes. Isn't that what we're talking about? We really weren't talking about unnecessary or frivolous trims. We're talking about trims that help the photo more than the extra resolution will help it.
JC
John,
I think we all agree that there are times when you need to crop. The argument seems to be over whether or not the photographer ought to compose his photograph in the camera’s viewfinder or simply snap something that includes what he thinks he wants and then figure out the composition in post-processing. Sort of what we used to suggest to each other when I was flying fighters in Korea: “Shoot ‘em down and sort ‘em out on the ground.”
I keep quoting Henri Cartier-Bresson because the geometry of his compositions was exceptionally good – perhaps the best I’ve seen, and because he was the most articulate photographer I’ve encountered: someone who could explain how he worked.
HCB always composed on the camera, and even insisted that his photographs be printed with the dark border of the unexposed part of the film included. On the other hand, his most famous photograph “Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare,” the picture of the guy jumping into the puddle, always (incorrectly) used to illustrate “the decisive moment,” was cropped. Like the picture of the three fifth-graders I posted above, he had less than a second to get the shot and there was a wall off to the left that he couldn’t avoid including. Another was the very moving picture of the woman kissing the bishop’s ring. He couldn’t get close enough to the scene, was standing behind a row of people and had to lift the camera up and shoot down, then crop later. But all of his crops were emergency procedures, not standard practice.
Here are some quotes from the Aperture book,
The Mind’s Eye, a collection of Cartier-Bresson’s writings:
“To take photographs means to recognize – simultaneously and within a fraction of a second – both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning.”
“One does not add composition as though it were an afterthought superimposed on the basic subject material…”
“If you start cutting or cropping a good photograph, it means death to the geometrically correct interplay of proportions. Besides, it very rarely happens that a photograph which was feebly composed can be saved by reconstruction of its composition under the darkroom’s enlarger; the integrity of vision is no longer there.”
I think this is what this discussion is all about. In my 79 years I’ve seen a lot of photographs and I’ll say it again: People who crop regularly don’t make as good pictures as those who treat cropping strictly as an emergency procedure.
I agree with most of Jonathan’s points – except the idea of shooting at a 4 x 5 ratio with a 2 x 3 camera. If I wanted 4 x 5 I’d get a camera that’ll shoot 4 x 5. I could set my D3 up that way, but I don’t because I happen to like the 2 x 3 format.
