Cropping after the event. Perhaps there should have been a health warning along with the thread...
Anyway, if I may return to my last post where I chat about the pleasure I am getting from old shots revisited, I feel obliged to defend myself against Jonathan´s suggestion that it constitutes failure to see something better during the actual shooting of the image.
I have no idea how Jonathan works, nor, for that matter, even how many other folks shooting girls do it. My technique was relatively simple and depended mainly upon two things: was it tripod based and with slow film (Kodachrome 64 Pro) or hand-held with faster black/white? Do NOT take that as meaning there was never a cross-over of the two.
The stuff to which I referred was Kodachrome. The technique was to find a good shape and make small changes within that, mainly of facial expression and thus enable a wide choice of emotional feeling within a simple composition. When you are doing that, you do NOT suddenly abandon what you are about and make a new decision to swap lenses and go close-up, at least not until you have finished the natural run of where that first set-up is taking you. You instinctively know when you have shot it all. Then, if you saw something else, you either go for it anew or you simply do something quite else - visual memory doesn´t last all that long in the middle of a creative burst! Extrapolate at your own moral risk.
So no, I don´t accept that finding something else in a shot means that the original one failed, nor that it is inferior. After all, the elements later singled out for attention because they seem extra nice were there all along, adding to the original, don´t forget! Cropping in this way just gives them a separate lease of life/identity.
I think somebody suggested shooting girls on the beach can be classified along with studio work... Hey Soos, as they might say in Mexico but do say in Spain!
Rob C