History of The Religion of Cropping ?

[dalethorn]

I freely admitted to doing exactly that....
 
Your first statement can be reworded as "I shoot around the subject and figure out the composition later via cropping."

1. Why not just admit your guilt and quit being so judgemental?
2. You would have to reword and reinterpret to get there.
3. I'm not just a one-act person. I do the conservative portraits the conservative way, do landscapes the landscape way, and freeform stuff the freeform way. No rules there, just guidelines. Your rules are just too rigid.

[dalethorn]

Yes, I have seen a few, and you're right, it's one perfectly or almost perfectly composed shot after another. That's because he knew exactly what he was after before he raised his camera.

The problem I see here is that the best pros in any field might *look* good every day, but in truth, those events where everything goes according to plan, i.e. where everything "clicks" almost perfectly, are the exception, not the norm. Not to say you shouldn't be all you can be, but unless I'm there looking over the shoulders of these erstwhile photo-gods every minute while they work, I won't see all the flubs, missed shots, wrong decisions, and numerous technical problems they experienced, which are long since buried and forgotten.

[Jonathan Wienke]

Why do you "by definition" look down so much on people's results when they crop later in their creative process. I think in this thread the theoretical image resolution reduction is established but besides that I have not found evidence that everybody who crops later doesn't know what they're doing, didn't recognise a good shot beforehand, are just lucky to have even produced a picture. I can even agree there are some people like that but I simply do not believe that people who crop later in their creative process are "by definition" all like that. You keep saying so but other than "believe me" I have found no evidence.

Cropping does not necessarily mean a photographer doesn't know what he is doing, and I never said anything remotely resembling "anyone who crops is lucky to have even gotten a picture". But unless framing loosely was done for a specific reason (newspaper work, yearbook photos, etc) cropping does generally mean that the photographer either failed to recognize an opportunity during the shoot (Rob C's examples fall into this category; there's some evidence for you), or recognized an opportunity but failed to capture it optimally (See any online critique site, and you'll find plenty of examples). Every photographer needs to crop at times, myself included.

What nobody in this thread has offered is anything remotely resembling a plausible and coherent explanation as to why cropping after the fact might superior to getting the framing right in-camera. I'm happy that Rob is having fun finding images within images as he goes through his archives, but that doesn't mean that the nuggets he finds are better just because they are crops. Dale's claim that trying to get the framing right in-camera will force one to miss other photographic opportunities is simply idiotic. His claim that shooting with loose framing allows one to explore many different compositions from a single frame has some validity, but you can accomplish the same thing by shooting more than one frame while varying the composition to see which works best. Then you can simply select the best image of the series, and there's little or no reason to crop. Can anyone give me any good reason why cropping should be the first choice, rather than a backup plan used only when something didn't go as planned?

[Jonathan Wienke]

1. Why not just admit your guilt and quit being so judgemental?

I admitted that I crop on occasion and that I don't always use the "best" camera available before you made the accusation. WTF more do you want?

[dalethorn]

I admitted that I crop on occasion and that I don't always use the "best" camera available before you made the accusation. WTF more do you want?

Among other things, the "I've seen no evidence..." comments demonstrate rigidity. I have a lens that goes to 400 mm (35mm equiv.), and I will shoot birds with that lens and no other, even when it means cropping 40 percent. You can claim it's not the right tool for the job, or make any other claim you want, but it is in fact the perfect tool for the job, for all the reasons I've stated. You'll never understand, and miss a lot of opportunities for that reason.

[pegelli]

What nobody in this thread has offered is anything remotely resembling a plausible and coherent explanation as to why cropping after the fact might superior to getting the framing right in-camera.

Now you're putting the logic in reverse. You claimed getting the composition right in camera was superior to after the fact cropping for more reasons than resolution alone. All I am arguing is that except for resolution loss (until it becomes visible) cropping is not inferior to getting it dead-on right when taking the shot. I never claimed it was better.

[Ray]

What nobody in this thread has offered is anything remotely resembling a plausible and coherent explanation as to why cropping after the fact might superior to getting the framing right in-camera.

Jonathan,
You seem to have a notion that there is an absolute and objectively correct cropping for every image, or a right and wrong cropping, or a superior and inferior cropping. I would suggest that there exists only a preferred cropping, and that sometimes, upon reflection in the calm of one's studio, one might discover alternative cropping options that one prefers to the original concept one had at the time the shot was taken.

Some photographers prefer to process their images only when a significant period of time has elapsed, after taking the shots. This is  presumably to help them create a distance between the personal emotion at the time of the shot and the more contemplative process of creating a picture with more universal appeal.

[RSL]

The problem I see here is that the best pros in any field might *look* good every day, but in truth, those events where everything goes according to plan, i.e. where everything "clicks" almost perfectly, are the exception, not the norm. Not to say you shouldn't be all you can be, but unless I'm there looking over the shoulders of these erstwhile photo-gods every minute while they work, I won't see all the flubs, missed shots, wrong decisions, and numerous technical problems they experienced, which are long since buried and forgotten.

Dale, According to your profile you've been around long enough to know what a contact sheet is. Knowing that you must realize that when you look at a contact sheet you are, in effect, looking over the photographer's shoulder. That's why looking at one of HCB's contact sheets is so interesting. Not every shot on the sheet may be perfect in every respect, but the distribution of forms -- the composition -- is consistently excellent. I can guarantee from personal experience that in a war zone everything doesn't go accoring to plan, nor does everything go according to plan when you're shooting on the street. In fact, on the street, there is no plan.

I looked at your web, trying to see whether or not your own photographs bear out your position that loose shooting and salvaging the results in post-processing is a more effective approach then seeing and framing the shot at the time you shoot.  Unfortunately, all I can find there is two copies of what looks like a photograph of a painting. I'm afraid these examples don't exactly support your position.

[dalethorn]

Dale, According to your profile you've been around long enough to know what a contact sheet is. Knowing that you must realize that when you look at a contact sheet you are, in effect, looking over the photographer's shoulder. That's why looking at one of HCB's contact sheets is so interesting. Not every shot on the sheet may be perfect in every respect, but the distribution of forms -- the composition -- is consistently excellent. I can guarantee from personal experience that in a war zone everything doesn't go accoring to plan, nor does everything go according to plan when you're shooting on the street. In fact, on the street, there is no plan.
I looked at your web, trying to see whether or not your own photographs bear out your position that loose shooting and salvaging the results in post-processing is a more effective approach then seeing and framing the shot at the time you shoot.  Unfortunately, all I can find there is two copies of what looks like a photograph of a painting. I'm afraid these examples don't exactly support your position.

My father-in-law, who did the paintings some of which are shown on the website, left thousands of slides, negatives, and contact sheets. I've seen contact prints for everything from 4x5 down to 35 mm.  Now, a lot of people just don't care if you look at their contact prints or transparencies, but those people are usually not in danger of having their reputation tarnished by a bad review of their not-so-good efforts that they didn't bother to burn.  But some pros are very sensitive about those things, and they don't want you to see their failures - just their successes.  You may have come across some famous person who died and had their lab ransacked and their experiments and failures put on public display, I don't know.  It sounds like what you're talking about is some person or persons who've sanitized their work in a given area and made that public.  I've done many projects like that, to make it look like I do near-perfect work routinely. No biggie.

Now your statement about loose shooting and salvaging are just plain incorrect.  Loose shooting sounds bad, and you no doubt have your view of what I do that's just not right. By loose, I certainly do mean looser than a certain someone here, but not so loose I'm just waving the camera and clicking.  I know exactly what I'm pointing at, and I do compose, and merely allow a little room for error.  And why not? I'm not going to devote valuable time at $200/hour to being anal retentive about shooting perfection when I can get close enough and do the final adjustments in the lab. And don't say I'm spending the same amount of time in the lab - we can waste pages here arguing about that, and you just need to understand I know what I'm doing. When I say some crops are 40 percent, that's not "more than a little room for error", that's because the thing I'm trying to capture is a wild bird who doesn't pose, or let me get close enough. Switching to a giant zoom and heavy tripod is absurd and extremely counter-productive for my applications, as long as I get a good enough result in spite of cropping. Judge the final output, nothing else.

[Jonathan Wienke]

All I am arguing is that except for resolution loss (until it becomes visible) cropping is not inferior to getting it dead-on right when taking the shot. I never claimed it was better.

So if cropping after the fact isn't "better", and always causes some degree of resolution loss (which is going to make the image worse most of the time), why defend it as a preferred method?

I have a lens that goes to 400 mm (35mm equiv.), and I will shoot birds with that lens and no other, even when it means cropping 40 percent. You can claim it's not the right tool for the job, or make any other claim you want, but it is in fact the perfect tool for the job, for all the reasons I've stated.

If you have to crop off an average of 40% of every frame you shoot with that lens, then it is not the perfect tool for the job. It may the best tool you can afford, or the heaviest lens you can comfortably carry, but it is definitely not ideal. My longest lens is 350mm, and even with a 1.4x teleconverter on a body with a 1.3x crop factor (1D-II), I still find it difficult to shoot birds without needing to crop. It's the best combination of tools I have for that purpose, but it certainly isn't perfect. There's a big difference.

You'll never understand, and miss a lot of opportunities for that reason

Given what I've seen of your work vs. mine, I'm pretty sure I understand more than you think I do. For example, I understand that if you had used a polarizer when you shot these, you wouldn't be able to see a distracting reflection of the trees and sky behind you in the glass:
[attachment=13702:P0001025...06_large.JPG] [attachment=13703:P0001037...36_large.jpg]

It looks like you were wearing a white shirt when you shot the one on the left. Here's a tip: when shooting things with reflective surfaces, wear dark-colored clothing unless you're trying to show up in the reflections. I also understand that if you'd temporarily placed a mirror over the artwork to help you align the camera squarely to the art, you wouldn't have ended up with these perfectly composed and cropped gems:
[attachment=13704:P0000152...10_large.jpg] [attachment=13705:P0001060...51_large.jpg] [attachment=13706:P0001091...35_large.jpg]

Most people but their best work on their web site, not their most embarrassing mistakes. If that is true in your case, you have a lot to learn about cropping, composition, and photography in general. Regardless of which is the case, you aren't exactly bolstering your credibility on the subject of cropping and composition here.

You keep making the claim that I am missing opportunities when I shoot. What evidence do you have to support that claim? Have you ever observed me shoot? Have you looked at any of my work, or met any of my clients? No? I didn't think so.

When I'm out shooting personal stuff, I typically pick a subject and then shoot a multiple frames of it, experimenting with various perspectives and compositions. Sometimes I'll only shoot 4-6 frames, but occasionally I'll shoot 20-30, if the lighting is tricky, it's a windy day, or there's some other factor going on that reduces the probability of getting a good capture. My family jokes about me being the only photographer they know who routinely shoots a dozen or more photos of the same thing. But when I go through the images later, I don't have to settle for trying various crops of one loosely-framed capture to see what composition works best. Instead, I can usually just choose the shot of that subject has the best overall composition to begin with.

I'm not missing opportunities; I'm capturing more of them while shooting so I don't have to crop them out of other frames after the fact.

[dalethorn]

If you have to crop off an average of 40% of every frame you shoot with that lens, then it is not the perfect tool for the job.
  I understand that if you had used a polarizer when you shot these, you wouldn't be able to see a distracting reflection of the trees and sky behind you in the glass:

Funny stuff. Cropping 40% all the time sounds bad - fortunately that's the case only for small birds. Even so, the results may or may not justify the effort - it's always case by case in the final analysis.

I forgive you for assuming my website contains my work. To date, no. My late mother-in-law shot the paintings with a 1mp Kodak DC260, and her daughter did the crops. Eventually I will get around to posting some stuff there - software, and some photos, a few essays.

Bad as the painting photos are, they do manage to convey a sense of what the artists's range was. And since he isn't/wasn't famous, it's disconcerting to think about where many of those paintings are going to end up.

[pegelli]

So if cropping after the fact isn't "better", and always causes some degree of resolution loss (which is going to make the image worse most of the time), why defend it as a preferred method?

Again you're using the wrong logic and making wrong interpretations of my point. I have never claimed it is the "preferred method". All I am saying is that cropping after the fact (until it becomes visible due to low resolution) is not by definition inferior to getting it right when pressing the shutter. You are claiming it is superior for more reasons than resolution alone but except for misinterpreting what others have said you have not been able to come up with one compelling argument to support this statement. I simply do not believe your generalisation that if someone doesn't get the crop right from the start he must do a lot of other things wrong as well, and therefore "be definition" will come up with lower quality pictures. Obviously there are examples that follow your logic, but that is no proof it's always the case.

[pegelli]

Bad as the painting photos are, they do manage to convey a sense of what the artists's range was. And since he isn't/wasn't famous, it's disconcerting to think about where many of those paintings are going to end up.

dalethorn, I like the paintings. Agree it's not the best pics but their subjects are nice. If the paintings are still in the family it might be worth getting your G1 and produce a good series with less reflections and better cropped. I think they're worth it, and it's a way to share his work and memory over a much larger community.

I especially like the two b&w portraits and the last one with the dog and the crab. Simple but nicely executed. I visited your website, and there are some other good ones as well.

[dalethorn]

dalethorn, I like the paintings. Agree it's not the best pics but their subjects are nice. If the paintings are still in the family it might be worth getting your G1 and produce a good series with less reflections and better cropped. I think they're worth it, and it's a way to share his work and memory over a much larger community.
I especially like the two b&w portraits and the last one with the dog and the crab. Simple but nicely executed. I visited your website, and there are some other good ones as well.

Thanks for the comments. I think I could write a book on this topic alone. It's hard to appreciate how long it takes to un-glass and unwrap 1,500 or so paintings and photograph them, let alone PP the images. I was happy not to be asked to do any of that except get them started. One of the amusing things to observe was the difficulty they had with the file management, and sorting out the duplicates between the originals and cropped copies. Loads of fun (not!)

[Ray]

So if cropping after the fact isn't "better", and always causes some degree of resolution loss (which is going to make the image worse most of the time), why defend it as a preferred method?

Of course that is the case; Rob C gave several examples of exactly that a few posts ago. But that does not negate the fact that those alternate compositions are not better just because they were discovered after the fact. If the photographer had discovered them while shooting, and had dedicated entire frames to them instead of cropping a piece out of a larger whole, in most cases the resulting image would have been better.

I understand what you're saying, but it comes across a bit odd. You seem to be saying if one discovers a better composition by cropping after the fact, it's not better than another shot one might have made, but didn't make for whatever reason.

There are a number of reasons why it might not be possible to get the ideal crop at the time the shot was taken.

(1) The viewfinder may cover only 95% of the frame and it's difficult to account for that exactly. A bit of guesswork is sometimes required.

(2) It's quite likely that the composition will frequently not match the aspect ratio of the camera, if one is fussy about such matters.

(3) The subject is dynamic and fleeting, or the lighting is changing quite rapidly. One might have time to take just one quick shot, but even if one had time to take 20 shots, the shot that is preferred because of its lighting, or an expression on a face, or a turn of the head, or the angle of a body, or the position of a bird's wings flying overhead, whatever, is the shot that needs cropping. The ones that don't need cropping are not preferred for other reasons. Resolution isn't everything.

(4) Most of us are in a state of continual artistic development. It's permitted to change one's mind about an image later.

I think it's understood by all who are concerned with maximising the resolution of their images, that it's advisable to strive to avoid the necessity of serious cropping in post processing. This point doesn't need to be laboured. It's one reason why zoom lenses are so popular.

I recall when I started scanning Kodachrome slides I'd taken 40 years ago with a Pentax Spotmatic and the standard 50mm lens, I couldn't understand why I'd been so sloppy with some of my compositions. I seemed to have sometimes chopped off parts of peoples' ears or the soles of their feet. Then I realised that the Kodachrome cardboard frame was masking a couple of millimetres on one side or another of the transparency. I spent hours transferring the slides to new plastic frames, paring the edges of the opening of each frame first, with a Stanley knife.  

[RSL]

It sounds like what you're talking about is some person or persons who've sanitized their work in a given area and made that public.

Dale, do you even know who Henri Cartier-Bresson was? Have you any idea where his contact sheets currently reside?

I've done many projects like that, to make it look like I do near-perfect work routinely. No biggie.

Well, if you say so, but I'm surprised you'd admit it.

[Jonathan Wienke]

I understand what you're saying, but it comes across a bit odd. You seem to be saying if one discovers a better composition by cropping after the fact, it's not better than another shot one might have made, but didn't make for whatever reason.

A shot you have is always better than one you don't have, even if it's cropped heavily. But if you have a full-frame version of that composition, it's usually going to be better than the cropped version. Your third point covers many of the common reasons for "usually".

I've already addressed your second point several times; cropping to convert aspect ratio (trimming either the sides or the ends of the frame, but not both) is not what I've talking about. It's an unfortunate necessity until someone invents a camera with an adjustable aspect ratio.

Instead of relying on cropping one loosely-framed image to experiment with various compositions, I prefer to shoot several tightly-framed images of a subject with varied compositions. This increases the odds that when reviewing the images later, I can select one that has the most preferable composition without having to do much cropping. It gives me the same compositional after-the-fact flexibility that Dale and others have cited as an advantage of the "shoot loose and crop later" method, with all of the advantages that go with cropping less rather than more. When shooting the compositional variations, I can also vary my point of view and focus placement, which you can't do by simply cropping. The only disadvantage is more storage space needed for the additional RAWs, but hard drives are cheap. It's a small price to pay for using foresight rather than hindsight.

[RSL]

Among other things, the "I've seen no evidence..." comments demonstrate rigidity. I have a lens that goes to 400 mm (35mm equiv.), and I will shoot birds with that lens and no other, even when it means cropping 40 percent. You can claim it's not the right tool for the job, or make any other claim you want, but it is in fact the perfect tool for the job, for all the reasons I've stated. You'll never understand, and miss a lot of opportunities for that reason.

Is that why this guy you posted over on User Critiques is so soft? Did you crop 40% or so?

[attachment=13707:Robin13.jpg]

[Chris_T]

I've already addressed your second point several times; cropping to convert aspect ratio (trimming either the sides or the ends of the frame, but not both) is not what I've talking about. It's an unfortunate necessity until someone invents a camera with an adjustable aspect ratio.

In theory, it is entirely possible to design a digital camera that supports multiple aspect ratios, AND fully utilizes all the sensor's pixels in each ratio. For instance, a sensor's pixel circuits can be designed so that they can be "reconfigured" to fit each ratio and be fully utilized. Or, the sensor can have excess pixels, but marketed at a lower resolution to reflect the same pixel count for each ratio. (Fat chance for a camera, but not that far off on a computer memory chip. On a memory chip, there are excess cells meant to be marked bad, if necessary.) Or, like dual- and quad-core CPU chips on a computer, a camera can have multiple sensors, one for each ratio. Will we see any of these? Probably not.

In many situations, there is little choice but to work within a framework (pun unintended). A movie set designer, and a cinematographer comes to mind.  Also a photog shooting for a full magazine page. If a movie camera can have variable aspect ratios as suggested above, will a movie be made with sequences of different ratios? Probably yes. But the movie maker will still compose carefully for each ratio, and make full use of each frame.

BTW, how many of you prefer a movie "reformatted for TV" over the original widescreen?

[RSL]

It's an unfortunate necessity until someone invents a camera with an adjustable aspect ratio.

Jonathan, They already have. It's called the Nikon D3. The D3X does the same thing. Both cameras can be set the shoot at a 4 x 5 ratio. I prefer 2 x 3, but the option's there.