The wonder of cropping photos

Okay, you know you've got the photography bug bad when you're thinking late into the night (when you don't have access to your computer) of shots that you've posted and how you should have adjusted them to make them stronger! LOL

But this is really cool, and for anyone who's interested, I'll share a little information with you that I've learned through experience and a couple of photography classes. There are people out there who on principle refuse to crop their photos - and they will have many more mediocre pictures than they would have otherwise. In my opinion, cropping your photos is not an indication that you're a bad photographer. Heck, sometimes the opportunity to get that shot is fleeting and all you can do is aim, focus, and shoot - and sometimes upon further reflection, you realize that there's some "dead space" that is keeping your photograph from being as compelling as it could be. I also find "post-production" cropping helps me take better photographs - I have to crop far fewer pictures than I used to! (or I have less and less to crop each time) I guess you could consider it training.

The photos I'm about to use as examples aren't phenomenal, but the point is that they are significantly improved through cropping and following "the rule of thirds" or the guideline of "fill the frame". The first original is a cute picture of my friend Isabelle with her adorable baby Audrey:


But there's a magic when it 's cropped - it becomes more immediate and pulls you in:


Another one, original first:

The above shot isn't bad. I love the light on the edges of the leaves. But the cactus is dead-centre and overall the image isn't as strong as I'd like. So, trying to make the picture conform to the rule of thirds by cropping it until the centre of the cacti is in the upper right intersection of the "thirds lines", I realized there was quite a bit of the cactus that I could crop without losing anything:


This is the photo that was bugging me last night. Yesterday I was a bit tired and thought that I'd effectively filled the frame with these cacti. But my subconscious was apparently displeased because, hours later, I was thinking how the cacti seemed to be pointing to the edge of the photograph and that it could be cropped a bit. I was really happy this morning to see that there is actually a significant area of dead space on the right edge of this photo, and that I could also crop a fair amount of the bottom without losing too many of the red flowers (which are an essential counterpoint to the cacti).


The cacti are still pointing to the left, but now it doesn't look like they're trying to escape the photo.

I actually thought about this photo some more and cropped it even further:


If you don't have a copy of Adobe Photoshop or some other photo-editing software that came with your camera, you can download Picasa from Google for FREE. I use Picasa all the time - it's an amazing and easy tool. I will use Picasa to browse through all my pictures when I upload them from my camera (Picasa can read RAW format, which really helps!!!), and I will use it to do minor/easy editing (cropping, converting to black and white, etc.) before converting the images to JPG. Easy, easy, easy! :)