If in Doubt, Crop It Out

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes, a few of those words need to be cut. Cropping isn’t just about trimming an image—it’s about sharpening the story you want to tell.

The power of cropping. I see articles from time to time promoting the idea that only the original in-camera cropping of an image should be shown and that there is more intrinsic value to an image if it is shown uncropped. That is especially common among film photographers, and it's something I have never understood. Let me show you a few images that were taken from exactly the same position. Some are extracts from a larger photograph; however, circumstances at the time dictated that I could only be in that one position—personal safety was the issue since a fall would have been devastating. Some film users even used specialized film holders to show the margins of the frame of the image. Humorously, I see some digital photographers add those frames digitally, which seems kind of gimmicky to me, but to each their own.

Several more images were made from this exact spot above. The lesson here should be look for multiple images inside the image you're creating.

Typically, a photographer will crop out a lot of material in any photograph they make. For that matter, a painter does too. So what's the difference between showing only a portion of a much larger scene when you create the original image and cropping the image down once you see the original image as a proofed image or as a raw file on your computer?

So when is cropping indicated? My choice is to crop when there is an element that is visually distracting to me. I saw this pine from quite a lower altitude and worked my way up to a position above it, but not high enough to isolate it against the mountain behind it... I ran out of mountain to climb in this case. So what to do? The light was exactly what I wanted, but I could not go higher, and the ridgeline of the mountains in the distance is a big visual distraction to me.

So the trade-off was to cut off a part of the needles in the bristlecone and get rid of the ridgeline, or keep all of the tree and live with the ridgeline—which is a monster distraction for me. In the end, getting rid of the distraction was more important, and I could live with the crop here very easily. The bottom line is that sometimes we just can't get everything like we want it, so compromises have to be made.

BTW, this was done using a Toyo 45A camera. I ended up using a 210mm Sinaron-S lens, a #15 yellow filter, and Kodak T-Max 100 film. Using a longer focal length lens, like a 300mm, and a higher position up the mountain I was on would have solved the problem. However, I was at the absolute highest point of the peak I was on, so that solution was off the table. Working with the image in a digital milieu would have allowed me to clone the ridgeline out, a very simple thing to do, but this was using film and darkroom paper. Though I am a very good to excellent darkroom printer, that kind of operation is beyond what I can do in the darkroom.

Another time to crop is when there are distractions on the edge of an image that were either missed in the original exposure or that couldn't be dealt with in the moment. And sometimes it's necessary to include elements that we know will be a distraction, but they are there, so we have to deal with them.

And yes, I do see the stick that is still there in the upper left corner.  However its prominence is greatly reduced, and cropping further down, which I could do, will crop out some material that I think is important to the composition as a whole.  So sometimes there are compromises to be made and you have to pick the one that does more what you want it to.

Crop out Intrusions

One of the things I commonly do before I actually do open the shutter on the material I am portraying is that I will physically, with my eyes, scan the edges of whatever it is I will be portraying, and then make an effort to get rid of those things before making the exposure.  Looking for what I call "intrusions" into my photograph.  Those might be tree branches, twigs, cigarette butts or even a dirty baby diaper, or worse, that someone has left behind; and BTW, when you  are out, take a big trash bag with you and pick that trash up!  Sometimes though, in spite of your best efforts there might be something that you overlook.  It happens to all of us.  When in doubt, crop it out!  Even when there is no doubt, crop it out.

Several years ago I was high in the  mountains of central Colorado when I came on an aspen forest where there was a grouping of Cow Parsnip that was in bloom in a very thick forest of Aspen Trees.  I, very excitedly, set up my tripod, took off my back pack and set up my camera.  As diligent as I was, I missed the salad bar of greenery on the lower left edge of the image.  It was only after getting home, processing the film, and proofing it that I realized what I had done.  For me it was a no brainer. The salad bar would have to go. 

The image, as presented here, is, for me, a much more satisfying image since the distractions of the curving aspen on the right side and the salad bar in the lower left corner have both been cropped out. The key for me here is to emphasize the blooms of the cow parsnips near the lower middle, and the many textures of the forest understory contrast against the bark and vertical form of the aspens in the forest.

Sometimes, there will be material on the edges of a scene that either wasn't seen in the original exposure or couldn't be cropped out in-camera, like in these images where I was, again, using a large format camera. Because of that, I wasn't using a zoom lens—only fixed focal length lenses are available. In the first one, I was walking into a location in Arkansas, and as I walked around a corner in the trail, I was confronted by these two sycamore trees. It was late spring, but there were still leaves that had hung on over the winter, and they gave an elegant color contrast with their red and brown tones against the wall, which appeared almost blue due to the luminance reflected from the bluish-cyan of the open sky to my right side. A complementary color scheme, and one of my favorites.

As you can see, cropping removed a visual distraction along the left edge and a spot of the open sky in the upper right-hand corner. Cropping can be a powerful tool!

Another time, while I was working as Artist in Residence for the National Park Service at Buffalo National River in Arkansas in the very early spring, the redbuds and dogwoods were blooming at the same time. (Interesting side note: that year, they had two springs—a rare occurrence—which caused the redbuds and dogwoods to bloom concurrently, so I was very fortunate to be there at that time!)

I was hiking down an extremely steep section of the Buffalo National Trail. The trail was extremely steep—the Ozark Mountains are basically vertical with a slight pitch—and there was physically no way to get closer or farther away from the material I was trying to portray. So I did the best I could with the tools I had available.

Cropping can be a very subjective tool. I preferred to remove the tree on the left side of the frame, crop out the ridgeline of the opposite mountain, and get rid of some of the tree material on the right side because I wanted the main attention to be on the white dogwoods near the upper center of the image, with the pink of the redbuds and the bright greens of the budding trees as supporting elements. Others might prefer to keep those elements in their image.

So the bottom line is to crop out what you don't want to show. Nothing is sacred, and no format or proportions are sacred. I was told early in my career that everything should be either 8x10 or 5x7 proportional and that all cropping had to be done in the camera. Of course, all of that is nonsense—it’s what horses leave on the floors of the stables where they spend the night. You are the artist! You decide what your photograph will look like. For better or for worse, it is your photograph—make it what you want it to be.