[Leica] Just for fun, now cropping.

[kididdoc at cox.net (Steve Barbour)]

On Apr 26, 2009, at 10:50 PM, Mark Rabiner wrote:

> I can tell you the reason.
>
> Photographers who had fine art aspirations of any kind and that means
> commercial photographers and photojournalists filed out their negative
> carriers and printed full frame black borders in the 60's through  
> 90's.
> A black border around your image makes the image appear to be not  
> sitting on
> the surface of the paper boringly but exist wonderfully a half inch  
> under.
> It added amazing depth.
> Regardless it added a lot to the look of a print;
> To the extent that if in a stack of prints you have one cropped  
> print; that
> is a print with no black borders people will draw attention to what an
> abomination it is just about every single time. You cant slip it by  
> people.
> "great stack of prints Mark except for the shot of the apple!"
> The apple shot was the one without the border.
>
> So its easy enough to say it's "part of your vision" and that was  
> part of
> the whole Magnum thing. The holiness of what you thought you saw  
> through
> your viewfinder at the moment your shutter accidentally went off.
> But it was all and still is pure baloney.
> None of it would have happened without the black borders.
>
> Now that with digital you can put a black border around any image  
> you crop
> there is less hushed talk about the wonderfulness of never cropping  
> your
> images. People crop the hell out of everything before they let  
> anybody see
> it.
>
> Working for papers one of the first things I learned over the  
> decades you
> can have the borders be as thick as you want they're just going to  
> take the
> face out anyway. And looking back at those tear sheets and my  
> contact sheets
> and my prints I'd given them that they cropped to the extreme the  
> image in
> the paper was always an improvement over what I'd given them.
> It's part of the "if its not good enough get closer" thing.
> Fill it with a face.


thanks Mark...I agree,

a photo, any photo is a crop...

so crop now, or crop later...

first thought, second thought...there is not really a sizable  
difference,

Steve


>
>
> Mark William Rabiner
>
>
>
>> From: Nathan Wajsman <photo at frozenlight.eu>
>> Reply-To: Leica Users Group <lug at leica-users.org>
>> Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2009 07:08:59 +0200
>> To: Leica Users Group <lug at leica-users.org>
>> Subject: Re: [Leica] Just for fun, now cropping.
>>
>>>
>>> Maybe someone could explain this, thereby explaining why some make a
>>> fetish out of not doing a crop later...
>>>
>>> :-)
>>>
>>>
>>> Steve
>>>
>
>
>
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