Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/09/15

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Subject: [Leica] Cropping fetish?
From: Peter Klein <pklein@2alpha.net>
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2003 20:54:55 -0700

Regarding:
http://www2.2alpha.com/~pklein/tofino/3-37MomBabySunset.jpg
http://www2.2alpha.com/~pklein/tofino/3-37MomBabySunsetCrop2.jpg

Afterswift/Bob Rosen wrote:
>Don't overdo it. You have an excellent portrait. Yep, that family would have
>paid you good money for that shot.

Bob, the exercise has been useful, even if it got excessive.  In this case, 
I think I could have gotten closer, and if I'd had more film, I would 
have.  I do sometimes have the problem of not seeing everything in the 
frame and not cropping enough in camera.

Part of it is because when I'm wearing my glasses, I can only see about 3/4 
of a 35mm lens frame, and even though I can see the whole 50mm frame, the 
edges don't seem as important.  This is less of a problem when I wear 
contact lenses, but I don't like to wear them when I'm doing a lot of 
driving or outdoor activities where I can't easily deal with any contact 
lens problems.  Perhaps with my next disposable $2500 (hah!), I should get 
a .58x body.  But I'm an available light hound, so I feel more secure 
focusing a .72x.

How-evah, this whole exchange brings up something that often bothers 
me.   There is an unwritten credo that a lot of photographers worship--the 
idea that you have must cut every element until the picture is of nothing 
but the subject, devoid of context.  And then they say, great, strong 
picture, you really got close, etc.

The problem is that often, if you get too close, you affect what you're 
photographing.  And if you cut all context, or reduce it to an ambiguous 
fragment, the picture can lose meaning.  If you take a picture of just a 
woman crying, you have no idea *why* she's crying.  If you take a picture 
of a woman crying in the rubble of a collapsed building, you have a 
story.  But give a picture editor the choice of both pictures, and he'll 
take the close-up every time.  And he'll put in a caption explaining that 
she is grieving because her boyfriend is in that collapsed building that we 
don't even see.

Me, I'd probably take the close shot, if I felt I could do it without 
intruding unduly.  But I'd also back off, and make sure that there was some 
rubble in another picture.  Just a few bricks and a bit of dust will 
do.  The part standing for the whole.

Mike Johnston wrote what I thought was a very good column about this very 
subject a while back:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/columns/sm-02-10-27.shtml

- --Peter Klein
Seattle, WA

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