To crop or not to crop?

[grant_.]

the camera crops, why stop there? i dont see whats so admirable about being able to shoot 'full frame', which is a crock that some teacher prob made up in the first place....get it on the film, ccd, whatever and do what you will with it.....

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as the song goes, freedom is just another word for nothin left to lose...

[tim_atherton2]

"Some photographers (Cartier-Bresson, Elliott Erwitt, Meyerowitz's street work)

had a credo

that involved printing full-frame, but that's certainly not a requirement."

 

more of an affectation than a credo

[._._z]

Probably, but for many, enforcing limitations of various sorts (full-frame photography,

poetic forms) can be beneficial in creating their art.

[________1]

I think it started as a legitimate credo and ended up an affectation. Hence the fake hand-filed look which I think might even be a Photoshop option. It became a style thing unto its self. I tend to cringe a bit when I see sprocket holes and a sloppily filed out neg carrier now and think people would be better off giving up on it and sticking to a fine black line. As much as I like Mike Dixon�s work, for example, I find the frame distracting. Personally, I try to crop in camera and almost always limit myself to either a 1:1 or 2:3 crop, seems to work for my present needs.

[tom h.]

"enforcing limitations of various sorts (full-frame photography, poetic forms) can be beneficial"- entirely true, maybe even essential when trying to learn or grow. A camera is the very first thing to frame what you're trying to show, and most people I think try to get everything in there they way they want it when they click the shutter, and adjustments afterwards are a "fine-tune" (and I of course realise some do not). I went through a phase of "full framing" and found it to be great discipline, though ultimately too limiting. I don't really buy the "there are no limits" POF either. You can take a pair of crop frames and find something visually interesting in virtually any photograph. Why would you want to? Every process (including personal and creative)has limitations that must be dealt with in order to give you the end result you want. Where you place your markers is what will define your work.

[jonathan_reynolds]

The big problem with cropping, to my mind, is that you end up with a body of work of radically different shapes. This is very off-putting when viewing a portfolio.

[raymond_tai]

Why not display the entire contact sheet rather than cropping that one good frame out of

it?

[back_alley_.]

i wonder if poets and other writers crop, er i mean edit or rewrite their work?

hhmmm...

[jonathan_reynolds]

Interesting question, Joe, but I would say that cropping is analogous to changing the form and metre of a poem, or the structure of a novel, not merely tinkering with the words. You can only create a composition within some format, some frame. No frame, no isolation and no composition - but these are essential components of the creative process. Sure, you can change the format to improve isolation and to suit the individual subject, but doing this frame by frame somehow loses coherence in a collection. Imagine if Shakespeare's sonnets were all different lengths and metres. And imagine, Ray, if he'd published all his half-baked attempts as well as his good ones. Also, there's quite a strong argument that geometrically pleasing compositions are particularly easy in the (basically 2 x 3) native format of 35mm - some say because it approximates the 'golden ratio'.

 

Having said all that, I've always been a tad unconvinced by HCB's 'whole-frame' ethic, given the distance-dependent frame-lines of the Leica M viewfinder. And to find a dramatic exception, in classical music the case of Sibelius comes to mind: a form-obsessed composer who used a radically different form for every symphony, edited again and again before publication, and produced a series of 7 individual jewels which hang perfectly together as a life-time series.

 

BTW, Marc, of course you lose image quality when cropping. Portfolio viewers will also quickly notice the variation in grain size due to the different degrees of enlargement, even if the cropping is only moderate. I suggest that you don't want them to get distracted by irrelevant things like picture shape and grain.