Basic Photography | Improve Your Photograph With The Right Cropping

© 2011 Wazari Wazir | Expressive Portrait Photography | Improve Your Photograph With The Right Cropping

In photography cropping is also the way how you compose your photograph but normally we use composition technique when it comes to picture taking process and we use crop when it comes to editing in Photoshop or in any photo editing software but basically they are more or less quite the same. During picture taking process you can crop the picture in the frame which we call “composition” meaning that you choose what should be in the frame and cut out unwanted part with careful composition.

Cropping is also part of editing skills apart from image enhancement, with the right cropping you can improve your photograph so much. Before I go further I really would like to stress out that it is better to get it right in the camera when it comes to composition, so you don’t spend your precious times in Photoshop, but there is a situation where you just can’t get it right in the camera, maybe your lens is not long enough to get the tight shot that you want or you just can’t get close enough to your subject for a variety of reason or circumstances and the only way how you can improve your photograph is to crop it later in Photoshop.

But please remember though, one thing for sure if you decided to crop your picture later in Photoshop, your photograph will loose it’s quality a bit depending on how much you crop, depending how large your original files is and also depending on your camera megapixels. That’s why it is better to shoot with RAW Format or if you like to shoot with Jpeg, make sure it is set to “Large Fine” so that when you decided to crop it later in Photoshop, you have a large file size to begin with. When you crop a large chunk of your picture, the end result is that you will have a “grainy” picture, you will see some “noise”, that’s why it is better to use lower ISO like ISO 100 or below, so when you crop, you still be able to maintain the quality of your photograph.

Like I said previously, it is better to get it right in the camera when it comes to composition but sometimes you can’t. I would like to use an example of my son picture above. I took that picture with 50mm lens, after spend few hours shooting, he get angry with me a bit, maybe he get uncomfortable with me chasing him around with my camera, in this particular photograph my vision is to captured his expression, his emotion, his anger and I’ve very little time to really concentrate on composition, and I really can’t get close to him because if I try to get really close, he might grab my camera and I will loose my shot, I can’t zoom in closer because all I have with me is a fixed 5o mm lens. So I’ve to shoot with a safe distance where he can’t touch my camera within his arm’s length.

When I come back home and look at the picture on my computer screen, I see that I can get a better picture if I crop it tight, I think this particular photograph will have more impact if I crop it tight since this photograph is about emotion, expression and I think by having a tight shot, I can make this picture even more stronger. Personally for me when it comes to portraiture, if you want to show someone emotion, expression, a tight shot will have more impact but depending on the situation also. Sometimes you need a background (in photojournalism, background is important for storytelling) to enhance the story telling and sometimes you don’t. Like the photograph above, the background is just plain blur and doesn’t add up to the context of the picture.

Sometimes it is better not to shoot too tight in the camera and it is better to leave some negative space especially if you shoot for brochure, magazine or any editorial purpose. They can use that plain boring negative space for text, maybe put some title on it. That’s why if you wanted to shoot for stock photo or magazine it is always better to have a reasonable head room for portrait so that the magazine can put some text or title above the head. When you shoot for magazine cover, or hoping that someday your picture will be used for magazine cover, it is always better to keep in mind to leave some negative space all over your subject, leave some space to the left, right and top or bottom and make sure plenty of space on top of your pictures so that if someone decided to use your picture for cover, they can easily put the title of the magazine on it.

I’ve also read somewhere in photography magazine not too long ago, there is this one photographer who customize his viewfinder for magazine cover. So when he shoot his picture, he knew exactly where to position his subject because he have the layout cover of the magazine in the viewfinder. He don’t have to imagine how his picture will end up on the magazine cover because his viewfinder is already customize for it.

Since the title of this blog post is about cropping, I will not go further about that “Negative Space” for editorial purpose but hopefully you get some ideas and hopefully also you know what you are doing. Get it right in the camera if you can but if you can’t then crop it later in Photoshop or any photo editing software. Undoubtedly a good crop can enhance your photograph. A good crop can eliminated unwanted distractions, give it more impact, create more balance image but nothing can beat to get it right in camera.

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