Come a Cropper

To Crop, or Not to Crop?

There's a whole school of thought that says that Cartier-Bresson never cropped, so nobody else should either, so there!

You might just gather that I didn't go to that school, and whilst I do rate Monsieur C-B as a photographer, I also realise that he's one out of many talented people with a camera. But the blind "Do Not Crop" mentality isn't one adopted by all the others. Indeed, I don't think it really was C-B's intention to "Not Crop", even if he was clearly a man who could do in-camera composition through the viewfinder, on the fly, extremely well.

That's not to say that every picture you take needs a crop. If you are regularly chopping chunks out of all your images to "improve the composition" it's probably a good thing to step back a bit and ask yourself why? Because you shouldn't need to for many pictures; that's why we have viewfinders.

A small confession first - and it is something I am aware I do and try to watch for, not always successfully. I wear glasses, and I sometimes find my compositions being a bit off to one side in the odd picture. I've thought about it and tried to get a feel for what's happening and I reckon I'm not always lining up the spectacle lens just so on the viewfinder. There's sometimes a bit extra "space", nearly always on the right, than ideal. So sometimes I'm making a crop to get rid of this human error. Interestingly, it happens less with my D3's than with the company D300's, so I don't think the square Nikon viewfinder is as specs-friendly as the round one.

But mostly, I take the view that you should be sorting composition and framing in the camera as far as you can. This is my view for picture-taking generally. I came from film, especially slide film, and that meant getting things pretty right from the outset. Yes, digital means a variety of image editing programs available to us, but why add extra things to do after you put the camera down if you don't need to?

There are always exceptions to this - it's not another blind "Do Not Do This" edict. And just to muddy the waters a bit, I also don't believe any picture is "print-ready, straight from the camera", so all images should have some form of MILD tone adjustment done to them. But that's the key word - mild. You are optimising the look of the image, but you should have gone as far as you can to do so before you press the shutter, as that way you've got the best data to optimise.

It may be that the image you need is not 3 x 2 proportion (or whatever your camera shoots). If you need 5 x 4, square, 16 x 9, then by all means hit the crop button. But otherwise, if you have time to think, plan, and interact with your subject, then you should be aiming to include only what you want to see. If you always crop around a picture you've planned, then it's time to step closer or zoom in. As a newspaper snapper, I have to remember any newspaper's space for any picture is limited and that usually means every picture is tightly framed. There might be a post later about just what happens after your carefully tight-framed pictures are filed, though...

Action is probably the biggest compositional and cropping exception. If things are happening right in front of you then there's always the chance that it won't fall just so in the viewfinder. Then you need to decide if a bit of trimming will focus attention or improve the framing by cropping in. I can generally do composition on the fly, but it pays to leave myself a little bit of leeway. For example, in team sports, the peak action will rarely take place JUST so, as the players have the whole playing area to work inside. Then it's time to crop away some of the dead space around a tackle. Even here, you've got to be realistic and decide at what point you stop shooting as the players are just too far away. I'll be a bit more specific: From a 12mp D3, I will crop a really good upright action moment out of a view picture, if it uses the full height of the frame - that's still a 5.3mp final image at 3 x 2 proportions. However, I usually think very carefully about a picture if I have to crop it below 8mp. This is why news and sports photographers frequently use 2 (or more) cameras - long lens on one, shorter lens on another, and as the action gets closer they reach a swap-over point between bodies.

Even in action images, there's still merit in keeping the lens locked onto your subjects as they get ever closer - keep tracking, keep shooting, and you might be rewarded with a great moment that fills the frame.


No cropping required...

Here's a couple of soccer pictures - the first the uncropped one, shot on a D3, with a 300mm + 1.4x converter giving 420mm of lens. It's close to being too small, but it's a good clear action moment (rare this far down the league ladder...) and the background is also pretty clear (again, rare this far...) so I went with it:

And then the cropped version - I gritted my teeth and went to 6.0mp on a 5 x 4 proportion, though the filed version stayed at 3 x 2, as, technically I'm not supposed to do ANYTHING to my pictures (Shhhh, don't tell!). I could take it a bit tighter, but left the remaining space for the production side to do what they will.

And finally, here's one that is the full 4256 x 2832, uncropped. Ah, joy, it happens sometimes! Again, the sides could be trimmed but I left it as it was to file.

A final question, though - why, oh why, is there always somebody in the back of an otherwise near-perfect shot who is wearing a fluorescent safety vest? I don't think he was a steward either...!

Making the best of it

This is an ongoing theme in the heady world of local press photography.  A job will appear on your picture list, asking for something that is going to be hard work to provide in the prevailing conditions. It might be time of day, location, the activity, weather, whatever. Here's this one, from a few days ago:

These two people are ghost-hunters, who have just started a new business, and will be carrying out ghost tours and investigations in the mould of TV's "Most Haunted". The brief was to get "spooky-looking pictures of them".

At 1.30 in the afternoon.
OUTSIDE a church the clients claimed was haunted (Not allowed inside, churches get funny about this sort of thing, it seems. Exorcism OK - it's done by priests - but the general public? No way).
This church doesn't have a spooky graveyard, either.
The weather was "sunny periods".
And the church has no north-facing view I can use.
So -- an unspooky time, location and weather conditions....

Hmmm, what to do, what to do?

Given that I had to use the church itself as backdrop, (1) was to hope that there would be at least some cloud, as even on a winter's afternoon there's plenty of sunlight washing about on south-facing aspects. That way, I could wrestle the daylight into submission with an SB900 so that (2) I could pop enough light from low down to make the scene look spooky, uplighting being one of the classic ways of doing this. I decided not to rely on the promised ghost-hunting equipment as props, which turned out to be not especially striking, visually. A pendulum and divining rods were the best on offer.

I arrived just before 1.30, very pleased to see that we were getting some periods of cloud, and the clients were there on time, willing to be photographed "spookily". Game on.

Find the best view of the church - I know it well, so it's the west wall and door, especially for the upright image I think will look best. I set an SB900 up on my camera bag pointing up at the subjects, fired remotely by the commander mode of a D300 pop-up flash. ISO down to 400 as it's usually at 800 this time of year - I could have taken the ISO to 200, but that leaves the flash feeling a bit weedy and I can't get the flash much closer at the angle I want it - shutter to max sync of 1/250th, and see how far I can darken the church by closing down the aperture and yet still have enough flash power to light the subjects. At f8-and-a-bit the flash is firing TTL at full power, which at the distance I have it from the subjects is enough to keep them well-lit. I select f8 to save the recycle time and now the subjects are actually a bit bright on the LCD so I ponder for a moment on taking the aperture down again, then decide that I'll shoot raw. I'll darken things in Aperture 3 later, as it means the church front will get darker too, which I can't do much further in-camera.

Sort out their positioning and stance, take a few pictures with the flash to my left, then to my right, then work out the best place to position them for a view (horizontal) shot, just in case that shape is needed, and the same again with flash to left and right.  A bit of chimping shows I have at least one upright and one view to work on, with one in particular already standing out even on the back of the camera. We are done here. I actually have to repeat this at another churchyard a few miles away for another of the group's papers, but this next church has gravestones to use and the cloud is nearly permanent when we get there. I do a variation of the shot, still lit from below, but using another SB to uplight a tree and some gravestones behind the subjects.

Once we are done, I download the pictures into Aperture 3, and a do little bit of post-production - an overall reduction of about 0.8/0.9 stop, then curves, highlight recovery and a little burning in (their hands are closer to the flash than their faces so making them noticeably brighter), which does the trick. Export as jpegs and FTP over along with all the other "immediate" pictures from the day, easily in time for deadline.

Here's my favourite, and it is the one that stood out initially on the back of the camera from the first church. Unfortunately, the final page shape ended up using one of the views... Oh well.

I still have the picture in my Aperture library, so there are a couple of things I might try out, ready for the next time...

Coming soon...

I finally sat down to prepare a serious blog, about the images I'm asked to create and thoughts about my work, gear, and the industry as a whole. This is early days for me writing, and I'm still finding my way around the template designs here, so things may evolve over the next few months as I settle on a look and feel.

I hope to post at least once a week, though I know that can be a big commitment with this line of work. I'll try to keep the tone light but (hopefully) informative and entertaining, though you may have to suffer the odd whinge!* However, I'm a local press photographer, so much of what I end up saying on a daily basis is complete rubbish, used to distract reluctant subjects from the pain of having their picture taken!   :-)

* Apparently, we snappers are renowned for this. At least by journos. Expect to find out some of the reasons why...