How to crop your pictures

It’s amazing how different crops can change the mood of an image or even just enhance them. By just making a few little changes, you can add a lot more impact and drama. I try as much as possible to think about cropping and where I want to place my subject within an image before I shoot. But there are times when I realize during processing, how much more powerful an image would become with a certain crop and to achieve that, I have to do a little cheating. But that’s okay – it’s all part of the fun in my opinion, playing around and finding out exactly what works and why.

  

For this image, the differences were subtle but effective.  I used my 85mm (as I usually do) and there wasn’t much space, which was fine for my purposes here.  It was actually my first attempt at free-lensing and I knew I wanted a close up of my little girls curls on the end of her plait.

She was moving as always, and it was very difficult to get focus, let alone the crop I wanted, so after taking the image into Lightroom, and using my crop tool,  I realized that it would be more effective cropped in closer, like this.

It’s an improvement.   I have the crop as close as I want it now, giving me some information about the background etc, and as much as I usually like the 4×6 crop on many of my images, it didn’t feel right for this particular one. I wasn’t happy with the creases and shadows that you see in her shirt to the right and felt as though they were distracting to my image.

And this is the final crop that I ended with.  A square crop that allowed me to showcase the curl, leaving just enough space around it and no distractions.

Another image that required some cropping attention was this one of my other daughter sitting in the window seat on a gloomy day.  I was actually in a different room taking this image with my 85mm and due to door frames etc, and the fact that I am terrible at getting images straight in camera, I ended up with this.

The first thing I usually do is to use the crop tool to straighten my image.  The walls in my house are extremely old and nothing is straight, so I use my subject to guide me.  She’s my main focus, so I want to use the wall that she’s leaning against as my guide.  I know that by doing this, other lines in my image might not be straight, but it’s just a feature of the house, so I just do the best that I can do and go with it.

Next, I play around with my crop tool, seeing what looks good to me.  She was pretty central, due to lack of space and me not being able to take the shot from the position that I wanted, so I’m not feeling happy with the crop as it is.  This crop using a 4×6 works better for me, it gives the image a little more interest, but she is still too central for my liking and I know that with more negative space, my image will have more impact aesthetically.

So I opt once again for a square crop and using the content aware tool I pull up more space above and to the left of my image.  And because there are no objects or distractions in the space around my subject, this image is perfect for using this tool.  One thing that I have found when using the content aware trick for increasing space, is to remember not to add grain before you do this, the tool will stretch the grain and make your image look ultra noisy.  So I always add grain after.  Stacey Haslem wrote a fantastic tutorial for using the content aware tool.

My final image is much closer to the vision that I had when shooting this image.  I like where she is placed and the space around her, it’s far more dramatic then the SOOC crop.  The last things I do is to add back some of the grain, (yes I love grain) and tidy up around the window sill.

Really though, it’s all about experimenting,  playing and taking control of your images.  I love the creativity that cropping gives me and that it can completely change how I think and feel about an image.