While attending his workshop, Jay
Maisel said: “If it does not add
to the story then it takes away from the story. Include only what is essential in your photos.”
Jay believes in getting it right in
the camera so almost all of his photos that you see are not cropped. They are as he shot them. I believe Jay is absolutely right but I
lack his talent of “getting it right” in the camera. Besides that, I think that some images just look best at
ratios other than the normal 3:2 or 5:4 ratios that my camera allow me to
capture. So, I do crop my images
to the format that I feel best suits them.
After I import the image, my first
step is to crop the photo into the format that I believe shows only the things
that “add to the story.”
In this photo, my subject is: the details in the flower, the
starburst and the bokeh. I cropped
the top, bottom and right sides of the image so that I had symmetry between the
top and bottom right corners. The
corners are not important however I think including about the same amount of
leaf in both corners helps anchor the flower. I know some people will be bothered by me cutting off parts
of the flower but do you know what it is even after I cut parts of it off and
is there enough of the flower left to show-off the details in it. I believe there is. Finally, I cropped the right side of
the photo so that the bottom leaf was complete.
Enjoy.
Camera settings: Nikon D4, 70-200mm f/2.8 at 90mm, ISO 1600, f/19 at 1/60th
of a second on a tripod.
Post Processing:
Lightroom 4—see above.
I cannot believe the difference cropping makes. Making the two cornerns the same gives the photo an orderly appearance.
ReplyDeleteBettie
Your eye does not have a tendency to wonder around in the cropped image. Do you think the starburst is too much?
ReplyDeleteAllen