Crop Shop: The Bronzy Hermit Exercise

Crop Shop is a new article series on Holy Crop! that takes a single image and disassembles the process of cropping as it happens in my mind.

Original Capture

Today’s image is from a Costa Rica trip with Worldesigns Photo. This Bronzy Hermit came out of no where, hovered for a moment above a flower and zipped off as quickly as it had arrived. It was dark, raining and I had no idea if the camera settings were even close. Fortunately,  had my flash on or else this image would have been for naught.  I snapped the camera to my eye, fired the shutter and prayed that Canon’s autofocus (notorious for long-lens low-light failure) would come through. It did. I only got one shot and the bird was gone. There was no time to compose in-camera.

Problem Areas

I did a little exposure work to see what I had left for an image and immediately saw possibilities. I also saw problems. If you’ve ever read my series on the Three C’s of Image Editing, you will know, I start at the crop.  I examined my image and discovered my problem areas.

A. Dead-center is deadly. Autofocus required my first priority was to centering my subject. Great for sharpness but bad for composition. The subject needs to be elsewhere.

B. Intruding distraction from the right of frame. This leaf has to go. It floats in space unnaturally.

C. Right-hand flower is much softer than the left-hand flower. Its bright, colored presence pulls our eye away from the hummingbird. It needs to go.

D. Too much dead space to the top and the left-hand side. In order to focus our eye on our subject we need a tighter crop.

E. Distracting foreground leaves. These are tough to crop and still make the image work. We will have to deal with them none-the-less.

Crop Theory:

I decided to make an initial crop before continuing working on exposure, color and the rest. I chose a standard 1.5 aspect ratio in Landscape and cropped until the hummingbird was on the upper right power point and the flower was on the lower left power point.  This crop allowed me to eliminate the leaf and flower (B & C). I was also able to reduce the dead space (D) at the same time.  (A) was solved by the placement of the crop.  With a single crop I was able to eliminate 4 of my five initially-identified problem areas.  (E) would have to be taken care of with other adjustments.

Finished Image (more or less)

I worked on exposure, saturation and some of the hotspots caused by the flash and was able to make a passable photograph from the initial capture.  The bird is more dynamic and floats above the scene as we would expect a flying creature to behave. There is little dead space now. The flower is balanced by the bird and the background is sufficiently muted.  In previous articles, I have cautioned that you should try more than one crop so I am going to practice a little of what I preach.

Panoramic Crop

The Panoramic Crop seems to work ok. I am not enthralled by it but it is far better than the original camera framing.

Square Crop

The Square Crop is interesting. It eliminates most of the dead space and puts the bird right down in the plants. I could live with this. I think the leaves become more dynamic as they slash through the image rather than grow out of the bottom right.

Naturally, a vertical crop would be the next item to try but I couldn’t come up with a vertical crop that worked without bisecting the flower. Cutting the flower in half vertically just did not work. Then I remembered another technique: Crop Rotation.

I rotated the image a little counter-clockwise and saw possibilities. What would happen if I rotated clockwise?

Now the flower is vertical and the bird is slanted. All of a sudden the picture becomes a little more dynamic. The bird isn’t just hovering, it is banking on approach-all thanks to a little crop rotation.  The other thing crop rotation does for me is it moves the flower off bias so that I can crop vertically without splitting the flower in two.

Rotate almost 45° and you can now get a decent vertical crop.  The leaves grow up and we are ok with that. The bird swoops and turns and it looks great. The angle of the muted background helps make the image more dynamic.

While we are here, we might as well try the vertical panorama. I would hate to leave it off the list. The subject is a little centered but the image still works pretty well.  Maybe a little tighter on the bird and we can still have that vertical panorama and not center the bird? Do you think?

Was I successful? Perhaps. The image definitely follows the Rule of Thirds now. We are filling the frame with hummingbird. Only personal preference will tell you if it is better.

The point of Crop Shop is to get you crop more than one way when you are evaluating an image.  From the initial (unimaginative but foundationally solid) crop, we have explored seven additional crops and created very different looking images from a single capture.

Exercise:

1. Take a “Dead-center” image of your own
2. Crop it Landscape, Portrait, Square, Panorama, Vertical Panorama.
3. Rotate it 30° and repeat step 2
4. Rotate it the other way 30° and repeat step 2

I am betting you will like more than one of them.

Rikk Flohr © 2010

Vertical Leap (revisited)

A Case for the Vertical Panoramic Crop

In the article Vertical Leap, I discussed the vertical panorama. Due to a couple of queries, I thought I might take a moment and discuss what went on in my mind when I chose a radically vertical crop.

The image at left is a finished image of a flower shot from the MN Landscape Arboretum. The image was originally captured in landscape mode. At the time of capture it was simply going to be a frame-filling picture of a flower. I liked the colors and the arrangement of the petals. Little did I realize at the time of shutter snap where the image would take me.  As I traversed down the country lane that divides my crops from one-another, I ended up with an image quite different from my original vision- a better image if you ask me.

The Original Capture

As you can see the original capture is horizontal and the treatment of the colors and contrast is quite different. When I began cropping this image, I sought to remove the distracting out-of-focus petals at left and the bright green stem at right.  I still wasn’t happy. Then I started playing with the crop-making it first wide, then narrow. I still couldn’t find the look I wanted.

Deciding Upon the Crop

The eventual treatments for color and contrast were vaguely suggestive of a stain-glassed window. After doing the image adjustments to enhance the window treatement, the crop upon which I had originally decided was discarded. If my image looked like a stain-glassed window with regard to color and tonality, why not go all the way and reinforce the effect?

Stained-glass Window Example

This stained-glass window photographed at the Cathedral of Saint Paul is four times as high as it is wide. It is a working vertical panorama.  It became my example upon which I would work. I set Lightroom to give me an approximate 1:4 crop and began moving it around my image. Ultimately, I found that a little (actually a lot) crop rotation was in order to get the most pleasing arrangement of petals. Add a little vignetting to suggest shadowed recesses of the stone-framed glass and you see the final image below.

Ultimately it took a rotation of 45° and a 1:4 aspect ratio to find the look I was after to emulate my stained-glass window look and feel.  Even though the original image had many other possibilities, my editing style and choices along the way, suggested a new approach and cropping brought me the rest of the way.

Rikk Flohr © 2010

*Frame treatment added in post production with CorelDraw.

Crop Rotation: Two Butterflies

Sometimes a simple twist of the wrist can allow you to remove distractions, improve composition and increase megapixels.

Every time we place a camera to our eye we crop off most of the world. Deliberate care in how we do this becomes the art of composition.  In making our pictures stronger, we must consider composition as an in-camera process first.  Case in point:

Here is a shot from the Minnesota Zoo’s Butterfly exhibit. I found these two butterflies on separate orange flowers and thought they made for an interesting composition.  My first instinct was to shoot from a standing position with my Canon 100MM F2.8 Macro.  I noticed I had some distracting elements in the intruding leaves on the upper left corner. I tried a second time-this time, zooming with my legs and kneeling over the scene. 

Moving in closer lessened the impact of the top-left distraction and brought the butterflies more into prominence in the image. The composition is still a little vertical with one of the butterflies essentially in the middle of the image horizontally.  Normally people resort to software at this point and painstakingly clone out the leaf at the top left or subdue it in some fashion.  Not me. I decided to employ a little “Crop Rotation".

Rotating the camera in-hand by about 15° clockwise, I found that the distraction was eliminated. We learned in one of the initial articles on the Three Stages of Crop that rotating (straightening) is a crop by default.  Here is that article for reference. Another wonderful thing happened as well.  Our centered butterfly on the top now lines up with the upper left rule-of-thirds junction. Our butterfly on the bottom is now at the lower right rule-of-thirds junction. Our composition is greatly improved because our subjects are placed at more powerful points within the image and the distractions were removed. All of this was done in-camera! I won’t debate the inherent problems in a two-object composition in this article-that is for a future discussion. So, let’s move on.

What would happen if we took the second image and did a crop rotation on it in software?

Well, the distracting leaf in upper left does disappear. That is the good news. The bad news is we lost our tip off our lower butterfly’s wing in the process. Crop rotation in-camera beats crop rotation in software. Thinking about our first shot where we had a little more real estate with which to work what would happen?

We have enough room to hold both butterflies in the shot. More good news: we have a better composition too. But, as the quote goes, there is no free lunch.  The image above, shot wider and crop-rotated in software is 2015×3023 pixels or just over 6 megapixels.  The in-camera rotated image is 2592×3588 or just over 10 megapixels.  That means a bigger print or a higher quality smaller print.

The in-camera crop saved 4 megapixels!

Let’s recap. Rotating your camera accomplished the following over rotating in software:

1. Removed Distractions
2. Improved Composition
3. Saved 4 Megapixels of information
4. Provided a Much Sharper Image

“Whoa! Rikk, you didn’t say anything about a sharper image.” You might admonish me.  You are right. I didn’t… yet. That too is a subject of a future article.

Rikk Flohr © 2010