To Crop or Not to Crop; That is the Question?

Custer State Park, South Dakota, USA

www.dennismook.com

For as long as I can remember, there have been two schools of thought when it came to cropping a photograph.  There are the purists, who would chide anyone who would crop an image and there are the pragmatists, who crop as necessary.  The purists would denigrate a photographer and his or her images if they were cropped.  Sometimes it got nasty.  In fact, when printing, the purists would file the edge of the negative holder back so one could see the edge of the film (usually the sprocket holes on 35mm film or film manufacturer and film name on larger format) in the print itself so they defacto proved they didn't crop.  Sometimes the pragmatists use cropping to cover for sloppy technique.  Me?  I'm a hybrid.  I don't crop unless I can't get it right in the camera and cropping improves the image.

I can certainly understand not cropping your photographs.  In the view of the purist, you compose and make the image as it is framed in the camera.  It is what it is, so to speak.  I can see doing that, for the most part, as now in the digital age, one buys a camera body with a good number of pixels on the sensor, say 16mp, and cropping reduces the size of your file and number of pixels in the final image to, say, 10.  (Whew!  That sentence was way too long!  But I digress.)  Cropping reduces the number of pixels you have available for your final use of the image.  If you desire to view or print at a large size, cropping certainly impacts that negatively.  Why would you want to reduce pixels, and quality, when you spent all that money for a great camera body?  I have a D800E with 36.2mp.  I can get away with cropping a lot better than an individual with 12mp.  But that is me.  Some don't have that luxury, but still I try to get it right in the camera, if at all possible.

On the other hand, losing pixels aside, cropping can help with the composition of an image.  Again, it is the vision, the creativity, the final image that is important.  If I cannot get close enough to crop in-camera, I don't hesitate to crop afterward to bring my main subject closer.  If I accidentally don't get the horizon perfectly level, I crop and rotate to make it level.  If there is a telephone pole at the very edge of the image and it has no value or significance and is a distraction, it goes.  If I am trying to get verticals truly vertical, I may level the camera.  Many times that will leave me with too much foreground  Crop it off to improve the composition.  If I make an image of the great vast expanses of the American West and, after viewing it back home, I find it looks much better as a panorama, guess what?  It gets cropped.  I like panoramas.

You see my point.  I crop the image because of what's in the image.  Now, I try to get as close as I can in-camera so I don't lose pixels.  But sometimes I can't.  I may not have a long enough lens.  The subject may demand a wide composition and by leaving it as such without cropping bottom and top of the image, my result in way too much sky, then I have to fix it later.

My recommendation is to shoot carefully and get everything--exposure, shutter speed, depth of field, composition as right as possible in the camera.  If the final image is exactly how you envisioned it and are pleased with it, then leave it alone.  If it isn't, then crop only to improve it.  Never crop for cropping's sake.

Thanks for looking.

Enjoy!
Dennis Mook