Sharecropping: Ben Willmore @ 7-11

We haven’t had a Sharecropping article lately. Sharecropping is our guest image feature segment and we were lucky enough to land the intrepid Ben Willmore for this edition. I had the pleasure of working with Ben at the Adobe Photoshop & You Popup Store in San Francisco a couple of years back and keep track of his many travels on Facebook. The other day, I happened across a photo Ben took of his lovely wife Karen while travelling through one of my favorite haunts: Badlands National Park.

The above image is the photo that caught my eye. Sometimes I feel like I am some sort of cropping savant because I see obscure trivia amide the clamor of an image. Like an image compositional ‘Rainman’, I looked at this picture and said, out loud, mind you, that “Karen is standing at 7-11”. For those of you who regularly read this blog, you may know where I am going with this. 7-11?

I asked Ben for a few details on the capture of this image and he related that he used the iPhone 5’s built-in panorama feature in the supplied camera app. Post-processing was done in Google’s Snapseed. So, Ben had to be pretty conscious of what was going on in this moving capture.

But 7-11? How is Karen standing at 7-11?

I brought the image into CorelDraw and overlaid a grid of 7 high by 11 wide. Look at the horizon. It is on the top-most Rule of Sevenths.  The important part of the backdrop into which Karen has been placed, is the landscape. The sky is incidental to the image and its lack of importance in Ben’s framing choice supports this.

Karen herself is placed on the left-most Rule of Elevenths. We don’t talk much about the Rule of Elevenths at Holy Crop and there is a very good reason. Most images don’t have the horizontal fortitude to withstand a Rule of Elevenths-based composition. I’ve found that once an image reaches a 4:1 aspect ratio or higher, the Elevenths becomes a possibility but not a necessity.

Karen appears intimate with the landscape in this composition. She is a part of it. Not only is she in the landscape, she is capturing the landscape from the inside-it wraps around her, enveloping her in the landscape.  She is a part of the story rather than being the story placed in a pretty backdrop.

Great photographers instinctively know when a composition works regardless of the ‘rules’ involved. They have a knack for knowing when a particular framing technique will likely yield a strong image.  As you explore the world of ultra-panoramic crops, learn to be aware of those little-used and little-understood rules. If you find yourself at 7-11 someday, pick me up a Slurpee™.

Thanks to Ben, and by extension, Karen for participating in Sharecropping at Holy Crop!  Next time you are in town, Ben, the Slurpees are on me!

Rikk Flohr © 2013

Sharecropping (Of a Sort): Sometimes It Crops By Accident In A Cool Way You Never Intended

While not a true Sharecropping article, it has that sharecropping feel to me. So, here goes!

Ever send an image, meticulously composed and cropped, of course, to a social media site like Facebook? Did you ever have that crop destroyed by the constraints of their web galleries’ thumbnail proportions? Ever have the opposite happen? Have you ever sent a great image to an online gallery and had the thumbnail crop give you a different and sometimes more compelling image? It happens.

I was thumbing through some images on a FB Friend’s profile pictures gallery and noticed this compelling image (4th down on the left) and thought that is a cool composition.  Of all the images shown, its thumbnail representation grabbed me the most. I thought, good ol’ Tom must have cropped this one 4:3 for it to come out that good in thumbnail view. I was wrong.

This is the actual cropping Tom chose when he edited his photo. There is nothing wrong with it. In fact, it is a very nice image. Those killer eyes are placed at the upper right Rule of Thirds in the thumbnail crop and in the portrait original.  But, I think you would agree, the thumbnail and the full image are two different pictures.  Of course the cropist couldn’t resists cropping the larger version for demonstration purposes on this blog.

I’ve tried to approximate the crop of the 4:3 thumbnail in a larger version. It is quite a different picture than the original.  It has fewer distractions in the bright white bar and less zebra print. It isn’t better but it is different. It is also something that might not have been attempted had not Facebook’s Profile Pictures gallery thumbnail cropping shown us the way. Drop us a note and let us know which version you like better.

Special thanks to Tom Frisch for allowing us use of his image. You can find Tom on Facebook here.  He also has a gallery on SmugMug here.

Of course this all got me thinking about something else but that is a topic for another article.

Rikk Flohr © 2011

Follow Rikk on Facebook or his Facebook Business Page

ShareCropping: Jim Strand’s Winter Reflections

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:

1. The image is a little down-hill to the right.
2. 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)
3. There is some lens distortion at the edges that also distracts the eye.
4. The larger trees frame the image nicely and need to be preserved.
5. 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.

Rikk Flohr © 2011

All images are Copyright © Jim Strand.

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.