The Importance of Crop

Last weekend a friend of Dr.Girlfriend’s was in town, and she brought along her two little boys. One night we had them over to our place, which caused some stress when the youngest immediately walked over to my lovely HD TV and put his hands flat on the screen. And a bit more stress when he picked up the remote and whacked the screen. Luckily there was no damage to the TV, although I have a few more gray hairs.

Anyway, while they were here I ended up taking some quick shots with the intention of converting them to black and white since it was low light and I was forced to shoot with a high ISO. Overall there was nothing real exciting, but I did grab another interesting shot of the older kid eating some ice cream with his father and brother. When I was doing the post processing, I initially did a vertical crop (see above) which is fairly ominous, and is very dark. The kid is peering out around a scary looking male heard

Then later I did a horizontal crop version and got a completely looking result. When you can see the younger brother in the background, the photo becomes much more playful. It’s still dark, but it suddenly becomes a family scene, rather than something more dire.

This just goes to show the power of the crop – it can change the whole mode of the photo.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 16th, 2007 at 9:36 pm and is filed under Photography, Sketchbook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.