crop rotation

Greetings all and Happy New Year! Today we are going to look at a rotation and a frame fill to improve composition through the crop.

Here is our original in-studio capture. The model has a nice expression and the wind-blown, neck-tossed mane has created a nice swirling frame around her face. The original capture is deliberately wide because the model was well, wild. Keeping her in the frame was quite a challenge as she was all over the place. Compositionally, we nailed the Rule of Thirds but the picture doesn’t look as good as it could.

The big empty space in the upper right is almost like a framer’s square marking a smaller rectangle within the larger frame. It is too big, too empty, too squared to the image boundaries. We can chop it off or rotate it to change the shape and size of the space.

Any time you rotate you lose pixels and we are glad to lose them here. The image needs to be much tighter and compositionally we can sacrifice that waving hand out in space. The goal here was to unsquare that awkward space. I decided to make the topside of the sleeve intersect the upper right corner and give us a nice diagonal. From there it was just a matter of how much hair was necessary to complete the portrait and retain the wind-blown head-tossed swirl of hair.

The final crop is a much more dynamic image. The aspect ratio is slightly on the wide side of the original 3:2 capture ratio but works nicely here. I could sacrifice the diagonal corner intersection or the extra hair at left to make it fit a frame if I had to. But, I don’t so I will leave things alone from here.

The final crop rotation ended up being 42° for those of you keeping score at home. Who would ever hold their camera at such a freakish angle? Perhaps me? That is another story…

Welcome to the May edition of ShareCropping. After a couple of busy months, the cropist is returning to sharecrop another image. Today, we are going after Jim Strand’s excellent homage to the departure of winter. Winter is still hanging on in spots in Minnesota and it is hoped that this last sacrifice will lead to Spring!

This is Jim’s uncropped original. It is a very cool image taken on a 4×3 aspect ratio camera. When I saw this image, I knew it had Sharecropping written all over it so I asked Jim if he would donate it to the cause. He agreed.

Analysis:

After looking the image over, I decided what needed to be done. Here are some of my observations:

The image is a little down-hill to the right.
The bright sky at the top is too much. It draws the eye away from some amazing detail. (Ripples in the dark water, snow on branches and some nice reflections)
There is some lens distortion at the edges that also distracts the eye.
The larger trees frame the image nicely and need to be preserved.
The darkness at the bottom occupies a little too much space.

Let’s go into the crops!

Crop Rotation: Let’s level it up a bit.

There. That’s better. Well, this is a landscape image so the landscape crop comes immediately to mind. Keeping in mind our analysis, I worked several traditional landscape crops. I found this one to my liking.

I took a little off the bottom top and left sides. I tried to keep the branch on the left side from lifting out of the top of the frame to hold the sky and just enough of the shadows to frame the bottom of the water. It helps but I think we can do better. Let’s look at a square crop.

With a square crop, I had to decide which side was more interesting. I chose the right hand side because I liked the foreground shoreline better. This one really highlights the ripples. I like this crop because it minimizes the sky and takes the image off-center a little. Now, let’s look at a portrait crop.

For portrait, I decided I liked the other side better. The lone branch jutting into the empty sky gives me a focal point and deals with the loss of the ripples. The image has become more about negative space in the sky and the water. Of the three, so far, I like the square best.

It wouldn’t be Holy Crop! without a panorama so here goes:

Here is a 2×1 with no sky. Dark waters abound! I am still trimming some lens distortion from the image but little else.

I wanted to add the sky back in but I found it was too distracting. In the panoramic crop, notice how the snow-covered branch on the right is much more prominent without the sky.

If panoramic is good, cinematic must be better? Right? Here is a 2.5×1 crop where we’ve sacrificed the foreground water. The picture has changed from darkness to gray. Two different and equally valid treatments result. What happens if we take it farther?

The 3×1 takes it too far. The water dominates. The distant forest is lost. The framing is nice but we’ve split the image into two competing factions.

My Favorite:

I went back to the panorama and worked it backwards a little bit.

It is still almost a panorama crop but just under the 2:1 ratio. I decided the sliver of sky was too compelling a juxtaposition of exposure to pass up. Leaving that bright sliver allows me to keep the curved branch on the left side of the tree on the right. I also kept enough of the dark water to close up the bottom. Those things decided, I just had to leave enough of the left to minimize optical distortion and just enough off the right to isolate the large tree.

Which did you like best?

Thanks to Jim for volunteering his image this month. If you want to be the Cropist’s victim in June, drop me an image for consideration.

Jim’s photos can be seen here:

Jim is an amateur hobbyist that has been taking pictures since he was in the Army. Since 1970 he has always had a single lens reflex camera with a complement of different lenses, first 35mm film and most recently digital. In the last year he has had a fixed lens Canon G11 that he uses 80% of the time. It has one major advantage… he has it with him when the picture happens.