Photography podcast #98 talks about why it’s OK to crop photos.
Many photographers on the Net and throughout Photography’s history seem to be against cropping and in this podcast I explain why I am NOT one of them.
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July’s level 2 assignment on the Photography.ca forum — Creative use of my country’s flag
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100% with you on this one Marko.
I couldn’t agree more on cropping — and the Che picture is a perfect example. There’s no way the original would have been used in such a way as the cropped version did.
Short, sweet, and to the point. Great episode!
Hmmm — that’s very odd Yisehaq, there should normally be no issue cropping to that size if the original was sharp and not taken at an ultra high ISO. Perhaps if you are cropping away 95% of the image and overenlarging the remainder…but I highly doubt that. My first guess is that the settings in your graphics program are making things wonky when you resize.
Maybe post an example on the forum for a better back and forth about this?
Thx as always for the comments everyone!
Hey Marko,
Thanks for the usual great podcast. I can understand that cropping improves/saves images compositionally speaking. What about quality wise?
I usually try to crop to improve my images but when I try to resize them to my preference 800X600 px or around there, it loose the quality, specially on those images which are cropped tightly like the che photo shown in your blog. Any advice on that?
Hi Marko,
Wow another great podcast! I really appreciate your inclusion of those iconic images to demonstrate so well the power of cropping. I’m sure that the photographers would have sframed up in camera the end result if they had 1-been able (perhaps distance to subject was difficult to achieve ie:Che Guevara’s shot) or 2 — they didn’t “see” the end image at the time ie:Stravinski and Picasso, both of those images were good to begin with, but a creative crop made them great. That goes to show that even when you think you’ve got “the shot” go ahead and play with the crop a little it costs you nothing but a few seconds and might just turn that shot into an icon.
PS: I love how the crop in Stravinsky’s shot actually added negative space…
Hi Marko,
Another great podcast and talking about cropping is
a great topic. As you said cropping has been going on for a long time. I ALWAYS cropped when printing my 35 mm in the darkroom. It was just part of the process. Although pixelpeepers will disagree, there is nothing wrong with a cropping an image. In many cases when you make a print from a digital file, something has to be cropped. I believe the problem is not enough people are making prints.
Thanks for taking time to create and discuss cropping on the podcast.
Hi Marko,
Great podcast. I agree with you regarding the cropping as more often than not it can be difficult to isolate the crap in the viewfinder.
The only thing I would add is that if a photographer has in mind to print out an image large size in say A1+ size with the intention to preserve detail surely there would be some image degradation if too much is sliced out of the original image. That is unless someone has a high megapixel camera.
BW,
NorthStone