To Crop Or Not To Crop?

That is a question. Okay, "William," is the only thing I have in common with THAT guy. Seriously, the cropping question comes up nearly every time a photographer is post-processing an image. It may appear to be an easy question on the surface. Oh, see that cute little squirrel I captured!? Let's crop everything but the squirrel so the whole world can see how cute it is! Maybe it is that simple some of the time. But most of the time, the question requires serious thought before employing those magic scissors.

If you talk to some of the best photographers, they will tell you that it is about getting the best aesthetic for the image. There is the rule of thirds and not always centering everything and so forth. That is true in a large percentage of cases. To use as an illustration, I just posted the following image on my site. I seriously wanted to crop the image to get in tight with the flying heron. But the heron was flying by this voluptuous banyan tree that was so big and beautiful that it dwarfed the bird. Take a look:

 

What do you think? Should I have cropped this? I bet the response would be 50/50. "The bird looks so small!" and "Look at that magnificent tree!" would be two typical responses on the pro and con side. I wanted to see the entire scene with the bird AND the tree, so I did not crop.

There is a side to this that few people think about. When we view things on our screen or when we upload them to our websites, they look small and they are. We are basically looking at large thumbnails. You have to look at the image at 100% (which you cannot fit on your screen) to understand what the printed product will look like.

To make that point clearer, say a customer orders to buy this image at 30 by 20 inches. The bird will appear about six inches big on their print! That's plenty big enough to make an impact.

So yes, for me, this was about the aesthetic. I wanted the entire scene as it unfolded. Others would choose to crop it. Neither choice would be wrong.

There are other reasons to crop an image for the aesthetic side of things. If you are shooting wildlife, a great photographer once told me that the image should set the subject away from the direction the animal or bird (or bug or what have you) is looking. So if the wildlife is looking to the right, you would ideally want the subject to be in the left third of the image. The exception to this is if you have a reflection and then you want it centered.

So cropping is a means of artificially placing the subject where it should go in a classical sense. The same can be said if the animal is moving to the right or left or up and down.

But thoughts must be considered for what you hope to sell too. For example, if you are doing well selling your images as cell phone covers, having the subject to the left or right might take it right out of the visual space on the cover. Sometimes you can move it over to make it work. Other times you cannot.

Say you hope to sell duvet covers, you will not have many to sell if you crop everything down severely. Why? Because it will be too small an image to cover the area of a duvet cover. Cropping will also limit the size of a print that can be purchased.

So you see, there is a lot more involved in this decision than you thought. An artist has to please his or her aesthetic sensibilities while also balancing questions about what you want to sell and how you want to sell it. And always remember that the sold image will always be bigger than what you can fit on your screen.

To crop or not to crop? That is a decision that needs to be considered carefully on each and every image you process. To give you one last example, here follows another image I did not crop because the scene was much to beautiful to lose: