To Crop Or Not To Crop, That Is The Question

April 3, 2008

I learned how to crop pictures when I was a young boy, even before I heard the term photography.

Back then, we lived in a remote place among the jungle of Borneo and contact with anything English was very rare. Man, photography was rocket science back then.

At that time, I was maybe 7 years old, I would crop pictures manually, using a pair of scissor, the most effective cropping tool in that bygone era albeit with irreversible results.

When there was a picture of me in a group, for instance, and I kind of like the way I looked in that picture, I would crop out that portion and keep it among my prized possessions.

Photo albums was also a rarity back then; so most of the time I would keep the cropped pictures in a small plastic bag and tuck it somewhere safe.

Now of course, things have changed; you can crop pictures any way you like using the simplest to state-of-the art photo editing software.

But I guess, the philosophy behind picture-cropping remains largely the same — to eliminate the portion you don’t like in a picture and to tighten the composition.

These two pictures here are from the same photo and you can see for yourself whether cropping is necessary in this case.

One final note about cropping: First, don’t crop just because you can; second, don’t over-crop; third, and this is important, always remember not to overwrite the original copies with the cropped ones as you’ll never know when you might need the original.

Posted in Macro Composition, Photo Editing