Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.”– Ernst Haas
One question that I’m often asked is, “After capturing an image, how much cropping do you do in Photoshop?” My answer to that question today is not as clear as one I might have given a few years ago: I don’t often crop an image, preferring to do it in the camera’s viewfinder but, and this is new for me, I do crop my images in Photoshop more than I previously did.
I think that my aversion to cropping stems from the all of the time early in my photographic career that I spent shooting film, especially slides and maybe considered considered the 3:2 rectangle as sacred. And it’s still my default shooting crop with my DSLR and mirrorless cameras, not the 4:3 that is “standard” for cameras in the Micro Four-thirds system. And i recognize by shooting in 3:2, I’m tossing away some of the Micro Four-thirds already skimpy sensor. My first DSLR was the 6.3-megapixel Canon EOS D60 (not 60D) and to maintain the best image quality I didn’t like to crop the images because I didn’t have any pixels to waste. Even today with a massive megapixel race going on, Micro Four-thirds cameras seem stuck around 20MP.
You see, I’m gradually getting over that kind of thinking too partially because of Instagram’s 1080 pixel limit, which gets the image format close to the 4:3 ratio. But sometimes, I think, this idea can be carried to extremes as evidenced by the SOOC movement or as Seinfeld once said, not that there’s anything wrong with it.”
I also think that my philosophy about cropping was influenced by the training I received from the late Leon Kennamer, who once told me during a week-long class with him at the PPA’s old Winona school to “get it on the negative.” By that I think he meant the image on the film should represent the photograph you deliver to the client to hang on the wall.
How I made this shot: OK, I didn’t crop this image at all. I shot it on film, Kodak Ektachrome in a Nikon F2 film SLR with the exposure and lens used unrecorded, sorry. I just liked the interplay of light on this building in my former home town of Baltimore, Maryland.
Initially I carried the “crop not, lest you be judged” philosophy over to how I shot digital images although I would make allowances for trimming the frame’s edges for unexpected surprises that were missed when initially making the shot. But I’m gradually getting over this approach. One of the features I like about Photoshop CS6 (and later) is that the Crop tool gives you the option of maintaining the original image’s aspect ratio or you can choose from a bunch of others. Because it reminds me of the movies, I like the 16:9 ratio and sometimes crop a photograph, especially landscapes, using that format.
Two of my friends, who are outstanding portrait photographers, crop their subjects very loosely in-camera often capturing edges of the background, lightstands and sometimes even a studio light within the frame, before cropping the final image into a shape that may or may not have any relationship to that of the original file or even any traditional image format. That’s not even close to my new approach but different strokes…
Please know that I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t crop, just think about the image quality you’re tossing into the bit bucket when you do. As my friend Rick Sammon always says, “The Name of the Game is Fill the Frame.” I think that’s good advice but like everything else on this blog—it’s something to think about, not something that’s cast in concrete.
PS: Just a reminder: My video Why Film, Why Now is live now on my YouTube channel, Joe Farace’s Videos, featuring a look at a my reasons and philosophy about why I’m a film photographer. Also Podcast #5 is now available as well.
If you would like to send me another kind of film to review or any other stuff that could be used for these posts and my videos you can mail it to: Joe Farace, PO BOX 2081, PARKER, CO 80134