Photo of the Week - Week 7

This week's post - cropping. The photo is from last summer, but it's one of the few instances where I have a couple of different versions of it and it makes the point well.

Here's the original photo:



Here's the cropped version:



Shutter Speed: 1/800s
Aperture: F4.0
ISO: 100
Lens: Canon EF 70-200mm F4/L
Aperture Priority Mode
Exposure Compensation: +1/3

While neither is a prize-winning photograph, I think they illustrates how cropping can be used to improve the composition and framing of an image we've made. You can't manipulate a bad image into a great one, but cropping can improve the framing and, to an extent, the composition of an image.

The original image, one of a series of rapid-fire shots (trying to shoot a bird in flight and get the wings in the right position), was not a well-thought out composition; I was just trying to get an image of the bird in flight. I knew I wanted the bird on the left side of the reflection and sun and the wings up or down, hence the rapid fire shots. As a result, the composition is kind of blase, the bird not really centered, and the whole image, really, lacking in balance.

The cropped image has symmetry and feels more balanced. In the image below I've added some lines to illustrate this:



While the sun and bird are on the right-hand side of the image (though the bird is almost centered), the bird is in flight, with implied motion into the left side of the image. He's still got someplace to go.

Again, neither is a really stunning image, but I think this example illustrates well how a bit of cropping can help improve an image.