A Little News

I heard a story about the famous photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson who once shot an assignment for the New York Times. Perhaps I should say, he shot one assignment for the New York Times. An editor at the Times did not know that a Cartier-Bresson photo was not to be cropped, ever. He cropped it and Cartier-Bresson never shot again for the Times. I don’t know if the story is completely true but it fits so well with this post that I could not resist. There is no aspect of editing that causes me more angst than cropping. Not that I have trouble cropping images. I have trouble watching others crop images and not just my images either. Unfortunately, complaining about the way pictures end up being cropped usually doesn’t amount to much so how can you best approach situations where people are cropping your images and you can’t do a Cartier-Bresson and just walk?

Now, that is the question. As you know, ever photo is a crop of life so don’t get to bent out of shape over cropping to start with because whenever you frame an image in the viewfinder you are necessarily cropping it to fit whatever you have “seen.” The problem in photojournalism is most assignments move fast and you don’t have a lot of time to set the camera on a tripod and recompose carefully until it is just perfect. Most of the time you are shooting on the fly and have to make course corrections in Photoshop with the good old crop tool. Cropping a photo then becomes an exercise in recomposition. This means you probably should know some of the guidelines for good composition. I am not going to lay these out here. Get an art book and check out how painters have handled composition. Watch some really good movies and see how the cinematographer handled composition. Of course, check out some work from really good photographers and see how they handled composition. Now you are ready to do some cropping.

Try some questions to help you crop the image. First question: “What do I hope to accomplish by cropping this image?” Make sure you answer this question before you start lopping up a photo. Are you cropping to clean up some distracting edges? Are you cropping to improve the composition? Are you cropping to emphasize or deemphasize something in the photo? You get the idea. Have a reason to crop. Don’t crop just for the sake of saying you did it.

Second question: “Does cropping this picture actually improve it?” This is the great thing about Photoshop; you can crop and undo the crop to check what looks best. It used to be a real pain to do this in the darkroom but PS makes it real easy. If you crop and something doesn’t feel right just undo it. TIGHTER IS NOT ALWAYS BETTER! Sometimes a photo needs to breathe. Sometimes your dominant compositional element needs to be small in the picture. Sometimes, and I hope all you editors are paying attention here, a photo needs to have some empty space!Okay, rabbit trail time. Empty space is not just empty in the hands of a skillful communicator. It is called negative space by people who know their stuff and negative space opposes positive space and sends a message to the viewer. The psychology of visual communication is a fascinating subject and too few even know about it much less know how to use it. A large dark area in a photo communicates a feeling or set of emotions to the viewer just as a large bright area in the photo communicates an entirely different thing to the viewer. But, indeed, the spaces do communicate.

Perhaps you can tell that I am on my soap box right now. I am about to become more reasonable. Editors and viewers alike may not be able to vocalize what they feel about a photo so it is our job as a photojournalist to sell pictures that need to be sold. Sometimes you will win and sometimes they will crop the daylights out of your picture. Just understand that the sun will come up tomorrow and the newspaper will publish again and if you burned your bridges over an image today you have even less chance of winning tomorrow. Remain reasonable even if an image is mishandled. There will be more chances so remember that editors, photographers and everyone involved in the production of the newspaper is trying to do excellent work everyday. You won’t always agree but you will be coming to work again tomorrow.

The photos for this post show two images full frame and cropped images with them. In both cases, I cropped the images pretty tight so you could see how cropping for emphasis changes the image. There is nothing really wrong with either full frame image and they could run as is. BUT, in both cases the crop tightened up the photo and helped emphasize the primary element of the photo. There are a couple of other valid crops on these images and you can probably see them right away. That is the funky thing about cropping, it is subjective and there are really no rules that say you must do it this way or that way.

That is not all there is to this post but that is probably about all you guys need at one time. We will do a part two to this one. In the mean time, hide the cropping tools in the newsroom!

Photos copyright The Decatur Daily. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer. (Though, when it comes to cropping, they should.)