Inside the Photo

I bet I crop 90% of my photos in post editing. Sometimes it is minor, to remove a distracting element on a margin, but often, I feel like I can make a less interesting photo more so by using the crop tool to isolate detail or just frame it better. Should I ever teach a photography class, I can see an assignment to take a single photo and create 5 different versions just by different choices in cropping.

Creation by deletion, now that is an interesting idea.

If you have seen my photos on flickr recently, you will have seen a lot of recent ones of sunflowers. While beautiful things, I have found photos of them are tricky for doing closeups. I am typically using a spot meter for focus/exposure, and if you pick a spot in the middle of the dark eye, you get an exposure too light. For this photo, in the original I was trying to poit the focus point on the inner edge of the yellow petal.

The resultant image was less than stellar, the focus is off, and the whole flower does not look that special to me.

But I did notice that the little spikes coming off of the center of the floor seemed to be in really good focus, so I decided to see if I could crop in tight on that, and placed the flower on the far left lower corner of the image. The direction of the opening of the flower ends up being mirrored in the direction of lightening of the sky behind.

By cropping this detail out, we are drawn into an aspect of the photo we might not have seem in the original composition.

See what you can create by using your cropping tool to remove something.