To Crop Or Not To Crop, The Question Is

I need to think more about when to crop my images and when not. Reducing what the viewer can see of the subject of an image to the bare minimum can take away from the message that I want to share.

Why I Sometimes Crop Images

While I challenge myself to get my composition right when taking a picture for my social documentary-type images, I sometimes still feel the need to crop the image for a better (very subjective indeed) result.

The reason to crop images, for me, can be one of two:

1. I want to change the aspect ratio of the image, or

2. I want the viewer to see something special.

The first reason is basically for esthetics: I really love images in the 4:5 aspect ratio and an added perk is that 4:5 images print great on letter-sized paper.

The main reason I would crop an image in post-production, however, is to ensure that the viewer sees what I want them to see. When reviewing some Street Candid images, I feel that the viewer would benefit from some guidance for what to look at to fully understand why I took the picture.

Why Cropping Doesn’t Always Result In A Better Picture

It is the second reason I want to talk a bit more about today. After reading the feedback I got on my initial publication of the image “Alley Leg”, I realized that cropping with the intent to show the viewer something special that I saw when creating the image, can actually work adversely

• Because I 'zoom' too far into the subject I want to show, the viewer does not see, can not see why I want to show it.

• If I want to show something important, the viewer doesn't grasp the importance.

• If I want to show something funny, the viewer doesn't grasp the joke.

The reason for this is that I eradicated the context from what I wanted to show.

I saw that something was important because I saw it in its context. I saw that something was funny because I saw it in a specific context. By cropping, I removed the context. And as a consequence, the viewer has no clue about what I actually want to show!

This, of course, is not always the case. Sometimes cropping can help to remove distracting elements from the image. And limited cropping might help to just improve the composition sufficiently to make the image more interesting.

And Sometimes Cropping Is Just “Not Done”

As I mentioned above, for my social documentary-type images I challenge myself to get my composition right in-camera. The main reason for this, as I explained in a previous article, is that I want to be as unbiased as possible when showing the viewer what happened during the events I documented. And although there always will be some subjectivity (whenever you take a picture you always have to decide what to show in the frame and what not), this challenge helps me to provide an as objective as possible record of what happened.

Good examples are the two images at the top of this article that are from the same event: one cropped, and one uncropped. Do you ‘read’ each image differently?