Exercise 14

What: The brief of this exercise was to take 3 of my photographs and crop them, noting the results.

Where: Various location

When: All different times of the day in differing conditions.

How: I examined my catalogue of photographs taking during the past few weeks that I have been working on the course. I selected 3 and then experimentally cropped each photograph

I started with this photograph; it is a long distance telephoto shot of some deer grazing among the gorse bushes.

I decided that there was too much background and foreground framing the deer. I then decided to crop down the photograph so that it framed the deer a bit better and offset them to the left of the frame. I felt that they were too static to be in the middle of the frame and that they needed to be balanced against the background.

I am much happier with the framing of the photograph now, not only does it emphasise the deer but it allows the colour differentiation between the ground and the sky to be seen, as the sky is no longer washed out.

The image of the frog is a little bit of a cheat, as when I went to crop it, I only cropped a small amount off the image

I basically removed some of the out of focus background as the shapes were distracting from the main subject.

In the last image,

I decided to do 2 crops of the image, as both of these crops have their merits however.

The first crop is a square crop of a 1 to 1 radio.

And one more which has a more standard framing crop in a rectangular shape.

I cannot decide which image out of the two crops I prefer. The square crop emphasises the shape of the curves and the contrasting straight lines of the pillars and the roof., it also has a greater sense of depth and height to it, due to it having more of the roof and therefore the light in the image. It does however loose the flow of the curves as they lead off into the photograph.

While the other crop allows the straight lines to flow into the image further and show the repetition of all the elements of the image. It looses its perspective and appears almost as a telephoto lens photograph as it has lost it's depth of field.