Sometimes, the smallest adjustment to a crop can make your photo much more effective. Check out this video for some tips from someone who consistently puts out jaw-dropping landscape imagery.
Nailing your composition in the frame should always be the goal to take advantage of your camera's full capabilities, but that isn't always possible or realistic. Cropping has been a valuable tool in photographers' bags of tricks as long as photography has been a thing.
I made the common mistake of liking my photos too much when I started. I would only focus on what I liked about the image and ignore the distractions or technical flaws that may have been present. As I grew and became willing to be critical of my own work, cropping out or removing unnecessary items in the frame became a normal step in almost every edit.
Photographer Michael Shainblum walks us through his thought process and offers some great tips on what to try when performing creative cropping to enhance your overall composition. One suggestion that makes a lot of sense is to leave yourself some breathing room when taking your photos. You can always crop, but unless you are 100% happy with the magic Content-Aware fill can create, you cannot effectively expand the frame in post.
I hope you find some of the tips offered by Shainblum helpful. If your crop tool doesn't look exactly like the one in the video, you can always change the Abobe Lightroom crop tool's overlay by pressing the "O" key. Happy cropping!
