Cropping and resizing in Lightroom2

I am brand new here so I hope I am posting in the correct place. I have what I feel may be a complicated question. Hopefully it makes

sense to everyone. Here is some quick info my my equipment before I get down to the question asking business.

Camera: Canon 5d Lens: Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM

So I took pictures using the equipment above and I load it into Lightroom2. I know how to develop etc. but then it came to sizing to print

8x10s. I just assumed that the images I saw on my lightroom screen would be the size of 8x10 without cropping out any of the image. I

was wrong! It really takes away from many of my images when I have to crop to fit the 8x10 or 5x7 specifications. So my question is, Am

I doing something wrong? Is this because my lens is wide angle? Is there a setting I could use some where? I took some pictures of a

friends daughter and I love the entire background. I really hate cropping it to fit the traditional sizing. Maybe it is to late for this batch of

pictures but is there anyway I can prevent this problem next time?

Thanks everyone. Hope my question was clear enough!

KG

Does the 5D have an 8x10 frame option? I know the 1D Mark 3 does -- this allows you to choose the 8x10 aspect ratio when you shoot.

Alternately Lightroom has had an 8x10 crop preset in the Develop module since the beginning -- but s you point out, you'll lose frame real estate fro mthe original.

And finally Photoshop CS4 has a "smart scaling" feature.

All the pictures that come out of your camera, regardless of the lens, are in the mathematical dimensions of 2:3. This is 35 mm photography, which your 5D produces. Those images can be printed full-frame without cropping at sizes at that same ratio: 4x6 inches, 6x9, 8x12, etc. For print sizes of 8x10 or 5x7, you will have to crop, and Lightoom has tools to show you exactly what that would look like.

There's no reason to crop at all, unless you are trying to fit pictures into a store-bought frame. But even then, that's assuming you don't want any borders on the image. You can ask a lab for 8x10 images, uncropped, but the print will have uneven borders.

Another solution is to shoot from slightly farther away or with a wider lens, so that the scene you are interested in will have lots of background, giving you the flexibility to crop to your preferred dimensions without impacting the subject. The 5D has so many megapixels that you can crop out small portions and still have large files for quality prints.