3.33:1 — Crop Ratio Revisited: Against the Wind

In a previous article, I extolled the virtues of the 10/3 or 3.33:1 Ratio for cropping a longer panoramic view.  The other day while shooting with my 4:3 aspect ratio Canon G10 I found myself in a situation again which required (to my aesthetics at least) a panoramic crop.  Eventually, I found myself back in 10/3:1 territory.

The uncropped original  shown above reveals many problems. Notably the reflections on the glass through which I was shooting.  They place a nice grid pattern across the image that will be loads of fun to remove in a pixel-based image editor.  Thankfully, I have excess foreground and sky to eliminate to tighten the composition. The star of my show is the bending steam coming out of the distant power plant stacks. I need to eliminate that which is unnecessary in order to showcase the steam clouds as a subject.

I have a great sky in the lower portion and some decent foreground details with which to work. I also want to include the clock tower as a minor player to frame the right-hand edge and face back into my subject, the steam columns bending in the wind.  A standard 2:1 crop gets me close but doesn’t get me zeroed in on the steam. I need a wider crop accentuate the all-ready wide subject and make it prominent enough to dominate the frame.

Thinking back to my 10/3 Lizard crop of a few articles back, I decided to use the 3.33:1 ratio here. I was pretty happy with what I saw.  Not only did it render the reflections moot, it made my wind-bent steam much more the center of action. I stuck my supporting player, the clock tower, on the RH Rule of Sevenths to balance the edge of the frame and keep it from over powering the intended subject.  I left a rule of fifths foreground/horizon to let the sky dominate.

There is just something about 3 1/3: 1 that works for me. Try it on those tough panoramas and see if the ratio works for you.

Rikk Flohr © 2012

Crop Shop: 10/3 Lizard at Valley of the Gods

When 3:1 isn’t enough and 4:1 is too much…

This was the lizard as presented to me in the wild. I didn’t have enough lens to get closer and fill the frame. He or she was a nervous little guy or gal and I found that if I stayed this far away the lizard would pose nicely without darting into those dark crevices. I composed as best I could avoiding a major distracting splotch of bird droppings on the left and fired the shutter. In-camera, I was happy with the crop but later, in post, I decided to see if I could improve the image’s impact.

The dark line below and the dark holes above were originally intended to be framing elements. The lack of contrast between a dusky red lizard and dusty red rocks wasn’t enough to overpower the shadows on the rock face. My solution: Crop them out.  After trying a variety of crops, I started working toward offsetting the lizard with some open space.  To maximize that open space, I went as wide as I could and just narrow enough to eliminate those competing shadow areas.

Ultimately, I got close and then decided to go for one of my magical crop number. The final aspect ratio ended up somewhere between 3:1 and 4:1 and ultimately I forced a 3.33:1 ratio striving to achieve nice mathematical 10/3:1 ratio. The lizard definitely takes over the picture with the distractions cropped out and the aspect makes for dramatic amount of space where 3:1 was not enough and 4:1 was just too much. Another intermediate ratio I often use is 2.5:1.

When your panoramic crops look a little wide or not wide enough try these intermediate ratios and see if your image doesn’t become a little stronger.

Rikk Flohr © 2012

Facebook – Added Impact for Landscape and Panoramically Cropped Images

In my last article, I discussed the new “Reposition Image” option for photos displayed on your Facebook Timeline.  Whether you are a fan of Timeline or no, you can take advantage of this new feature: Highlight.

In this standard Timeline view you can see the picture of the singing meadowlark is cropped awkwardly. We could reposition it as I detailed in the previous article to make the images’ subject more powerful within the square aspect-ratio window, or we could invoke the new Highlight feature.  The red arrow in the image above shows the Highlight option.

Clicking the Highlight star does two things. One, it gives you a much wider view of your image, and two, it makes it span both of the columns in your Timeline.  You now have a panoramic window in which to view your image.  The new image is slightly more than a 2:1 aspect ration making it a legitimate Panoramic Crop.  When I measure it out, the window is roughly 840×400 pixels: 2.1:1 – very cinematic.

The Reposition option is still available to you to fine-tune your landscape image up or down to make the window show a more pleasing rendition of your image.  All-in-all, it is a nice solution for displaying your images in a stronger fashion.

Of course, with all things Facebook, it doesn’t work everywhere. If you try to highlight a portrait orientation image, this is the result. Not very good, is it? There is too much white space around the image. A better solution would be to take portrait images and leave them single column but show the full height of the image. They would gain impact and not cause design or page flow to suffer.

With the advent of the Reposition and the Highlight features, Facebook is taking a positive step towards the proper and more aesthetically pleasing display of your photos. They should be lauded for this but encouraged to go the rest of the way.

Take a little time and add Highlighting and Repositioning to your Facebook arsenal.

Next time we will talk about the Missing Aspect Ratio on Facebook.

Rikk Flohr © 2012