Photography | How To Crop Images

© 2009 Wazari Wazir | Senior Portrait | Lake Garden

For me cropping is an art in itself, some people prefer to do a cropping in the camera, we don’t call it a cropping if you do it in the camera but that’s composition. We can make good composition right in the camera if we have the time to do that, like taking a portrait in the studio, shoot landscape, architecture, when you almost have total control of your subject but sometimes when it comes to shoot fast moving subject, sports for an example it is difficult to get a nice composition in the frame, because the subject moving so fast, and it’s harder to keep the rules of third while focusing and it was so much easier to get sharp image while our subject stay right in the middle of the frame, I know that some experience sports photographer who can nail the shot with nice framing in the camera with super fast tracking system that their camera have but to others cropping will come into rescue.

As a human we are not perfect creature, always makes mistake no matter how experience we are, there was a time that we overlook few small things that later on become a distraction on the frame, few things that we don’t want n the frame, that’s where the cropping comes into play, we crop an images to eliminate  distraction element, we can do this if the distraction is on the edges of your image, where we can just cropped it but if the distraction was at the centre of the image, that might be difficult, maybe you want to try other editing method like cloning for an example, but in this article I want to talk about cropping without any cloning or stamping technique.

The original image for the picture above is a bit loose, both her eyes are in the frame but I cropped it that way to give the picture more impact but still I leave some negative space on the right side of the frame for some breathing space, if I cropped it tighter closer to her eyes, then it will look too cramped, so I leave some empty negative space there.

It helps if we have super megapixel camera like 15 megapixel or more and shooting with large files at low ISO like ISO 100, so when we want to cropped the picture, we can still retain the quality of the picture without losing too much details. There was a situation where we need to crop the picture because the image look too small in the camera, maybe because we can’t get close to the subject for whatever reason, maybe because we don’t have a longer lens to captured certain picture like for an example if we shoot wildlife with 70-200mm lens while other people shooting with 400mm lens.

We may have captured a better picture than our friends who have  super telephoto lens but our picture are a bit small compare to them, so the solution is to cropped the picture later in the Photoshop or any editing software to make the animal fills the frame and eliminating all the unwanted distraction in the frame. So if you have higher megapixel camera, cropping can still maintain the details even though we can’t match the quality of those who shoot with 400mm lens, but in certain  situation it does help.

Actually the art of cropping is almost the same as the art of composition, the different is that we do the “composition” in the editing software, in Photoshop for an example, personally for me I like to shoot my picture a little bit loose than tight, I like tight “cropping”  but when it comes to photo shoot, I like to make it loose. If you shoot for a magazine, always keep in mind about composition, always have some “negative space” be it on the other side of the frame or some empty space at the top of the frame.

We must keep in mind that a magazine sometimes need that empty space to put  a text into it, maybe they like to put a short title or caption into that empty space or if they like to use the picture for the cover of the magazine, usually they prefer a picture which have some negative space at the  top of the frame. For portrait, maybe they want some empty space above the person head in order for them to insert the magazine title into it. It is always good to have some empty space in the frame because then we have a “choice” of what we want to do with the picture later on. For me, I like to get it “tight” when cropping in the Photoshop but I will always leave some empty space during picture taking.

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