Re: [Leica] Fresh Meat

["Mxsmanic" <mxsmanic@hotmail.com>]

Dave Hillman writes:

> Habitually, do you crop images when printing them?

Almost never, with three exceptions:

1. For Web display, I may crop to allow me to enlarge and show more detail,
since screen resolution is very low and images tend to be tiny, and if they
contain a lot of detail it gets lost.  In these cases I crop to let me enlarge
the most relevant detail in the image.  The cropping is usually conservative,
and in many cases it simply means cropping from a 2:3 aspect ratio to a
screen-like 3:4 ratio, if the sides of the image can be sacrificed without
losing too much.

2. For any use, if the composition of the image just could not be made to fit
into a 2:3 aspect ratio.  This is pretty rare but it happens.

3. For any use, if I didn't have a focal length long enough handy at the time of
the shot.  I shoot wide and crop to the focal length I wanted.  This is pretty
rare, too, but sometimes you just cannot get close enough, but you don't want to
lose the shot.

In all cases, my cropping is severely limited by the fact that I often shoot
Tri-X, which gets way too grainy if you crop and enlarge even a little bit.
Also, since I work from 2700 dpi scans, I don't have a lot of headroom to crop
and enlarge (except for Web use, which has very modest requirements for
resolution).