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Cropping

THE LOST ART OF CROPPING
Cropping a picture—slicing off an extraneous detail or closing in tight on a face in a waist-up portrait, for example—usually results in a better photograph that’s more tightly composed, better focused on the subject, more directly stated, more engaging for the viewer.

Credit: Popular Photography, May 2001

The crop heard round the world: The full frame of Arnold Newman’s renowned study of the piercing gaze of Pablo Picasso was, ironically, just the sort of framing and composition that Picasso used in many of his own photos. Taken in 1954 in Picasso’s studio in Vallauris, France, the image was probably made with a six-inch (moderate wide-angle) lens. “I wanted to have space,” Newman recalls. “Because you would have this powerful man coming out of space, I felt it worked, except the more I looked at the proofs, I kept saying what a fantastic expression.” Newman added the white cropping lines as an illustration for his book One Mind’s Eye.

The Gaze, Concentrated: “I photographed God knows how many presidents, prime ministers, and he’s the only one that had that kind of piercing glance,” says Newman. “And I said, what happens if I just concentrate on that intense look? The more I looked at it, the more I thought, the rest is superfluous. I came in close, and all I could say is wow!”

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The basic crop—trimming unwanted detail: “I would say never crop unless it’s an emergency!” says travel shooter Bob Krist. Here, Krist was shooting handheld at the Philadelphia Mummers Day Parade to catch marchers as they moved through bands of winter sunlight raking through tall buildings. “I tried to scan the edges of the frame before I shot to eliminate clutter, but with moving subjects, a zoom that stopped at 200mm, and limited shooting positions, I got stuck with some clutter at the edges of the frame. That’s when I crop.”

Clutter, canned: While ordinarily Krist simply marks his suggested cropping on a slide mount, in this case he scanned the image and cropped the picture in Photoshop. The crop eliminates the background noise—traffic lights, buildings, patches of sky—but also achieves something else. By cropping into the edges of the feathery costumes, it makes them into a photographic backdrop, popping the banjo players out into a foreground layer.

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Cropping for color concentration: Marc Muench was driving along the Last Dollar Road in Colorado in October, scouting for images of autumn foliage. He made this initial image on Fujichrome Velvia with a handheld Pentax and 300mm lens wide open. The 300mm was the longest lens Muench had, so he took the shot, knowing he would crop later for the central portion of the frame. While the diagonal slice of evergreens at the top adds something of a design element, it distracts from the true subject of the picture—color. The picture also has a random quality to it, with the evergreens at the left edge pulling the eye from the center.

Tighter and brighter: Two evergreens form a simple diagonal at sweet spots within a sea of gold. The slightly darker area in the break of the trees at the bottom doesn’t distract so much as it draws the eye into the frame. This, Muench said, was the picture he envisioned. Although traditional medium-format film gave Muench sufficient area to crop tight, he used digital scanning and Photoshop to create the new framing.

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Cropping for commercial considerations: Steven Hirsch, on assignment for the New York Post, was asked to photograph the flooding caused by Hurricane Floyd in September 1999. With a tip from the police radio that storm sewers were backing up in lower Manhattan's SoHo, Hirsch took his Nikon 950 to West Broadway, where he was able to get one frame of a speedy bike messenger slogging through the floodwaters. “Considering this might be a cover shot, I immediately realized the framing was too wide,” Hirsch recalls.

In-computer crop: Later, on his home Mac, Hirsch cropped the image tighter in Photoshop. By eliminating the car parked in the distance at left in the frame, the crop strengthens the impression that the entire street is flooded, not just one section. The vertical framing also concentrates the eye on the splashing cyclist and places the waterline fully two-thirds of the way up the frame, which reinforces the perception of water, water everywhere.

Read all about it: After receiving the transmitted image, Post editors cropped it with the cyclist at the side of the frame in order to drop headline type into the picture. Note how the composition was diagonally arrayed to fit the type in as a graphic element.