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The Crop
3 July 2024
Not long after we launched Photo Corners, we decided to highlight Feature stories with a thumbnail we could use in a carousel at the top of the home page. That thumbnail was so much smaller than the fuller images that we decided to always make it a crop.
An Iris. Nikon D200 with 35mm f2.8 Nikkor (52mm equivalent) at f8, 1/1500 second and ISO 200. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw.
Making those crops from the larger images has been an education. We often like the crop more than the full image. And we wondered why that is.
Our particular preferred focal lengths are telephoto, we admit. We don't much care for the chaos of a wide angle view of the world. We like our gaze to be directed.
Because, in our case, our attention is narrow by default.
We peer into a scene and see something that strikes us. But when we raise the camera to our eye to compose the shot, we are confronted with a formality that imposes a generous 1:1 or 3:2 or 4:5 or 16:9 frame on the world.
Our tight thumbnail crops, however, tend to reflect our initial attraction to the scene rather than the final composition.
This iris is a good example.
We were shooting with a 35mm lens on an APS-C sensor so the crop was similar to a 52mm lens on a full-frame sensor. We could only get as close to the iris as the Original crop above shows. That left a lot of rather unattractive background.
We didn't mind because we liked the long curve of the plant's stem supporting the flower. But when it came time to edit it, we disliked the spotty brown background. And we really liked the fountain-like purple petals.
Still, we cropped it like a good school boy and then made the thumbnail. Which we liked so much more than the full composition. Oh hell, we thought, let's start over with the tight crop.
So we did.
The results were such an improvement that we went back to Monday's image and applied the same approach. What was it that attracted us to that scene? The water pipes, not the conduit. And it was the vertical arrangement not the horizontal one (which works better on the site) that we saw immediately.
So we recropped that here, too. And yes, we like it better.
