A Little News

Knowing when to crop an image is probably the first prerequisite to cropping an image. Sounds pretty much like a Duh! moment doesn’t it? Keep in mind, you may know when to crop and how to crop but you may be working with others who may be lacking some of your expertise. (Wasn’t that tactful!) So helping others learn how to crop might be to your long term advantage. With this post I have included three photos that show when to crop and when not to crop. Lets start with the portrait.

When you look at the image you can see that the rule of thirds is in play in the first version. The man is off center and his face hits one of the intersection points where the thirds cross. The background is a pleasing melange of color and does not in any way detract from the feel of the portrait. The second version culls out much of the background and eliminates the rule of thirds composition and bulls eyes the guy. No good. This is a photo that does not need cropping so leave it alone.

The second photo is a feature shot from a softball game. The team is being introduced and I used an eccentric composition to contrast the two circles. The girls form a large circle in the right side of the frame and I left in the batters box circle to give an opposing visual element that also provides a bit of quirkiness and sense of visual balance. The second photo crops the image so there is only one circle with the players. Bad crop. Don’t do it. The first photo has greater visual interest and it causes the reader to stop and look just a little longer and that is a good thing. You want to hold your readership on the page as long as you can. You just don’t want a photo to become so complex that the reader gives up in frustration and turns the page. It is a newspaper and not an art museum.

The third photo is an example where cropping the picture is a good thing. The first photo shows President Bush pressing the flesh after a speaking engagement but there is a large, white blob in the upper right corner. The second photo tightens up on the President and eliminates the blob and brings you right into his face. An alternative to this would be to make the photo a vertical and go even tighter on his face. Either one works. This is a good crop. Do it.

The funny, and I mean this in the funny-unnerving sense, is none of these photos is really ruined by cropping or by leaving them alone. Cropping is very subjective. You as the photographer have the strongest emotions about the crop because it is your work, your creation and your crop reflects the way you saw the image and the way you felt about what you saw. The editor looks at it with a bit more detachment and he may see something that is distracting or may see a crop that will actually help the image communicate so stay open to the possibility of a greater crop.

There are some photos you crop and others you leave alone. You need to know which is which and if you don’t know you need to consult the people who do know. If you have trouble cropping your own images, ask your fellow photographers. You will get no shortage of opinion. Then you can sort out how you want to crop. Remember this, every photo is yours and it is an expression of your vision. Make sure your crops portray your vision. Consult others but the final decision is yours. When you turn the photo in, if you have a strong opinion about the crop, voice it in a professional manner. Always remember, the paper is going to publish again the next day so if you lose today keep on fighting for tomorrow will bring another chance. It will be to your great benefit to remember that the editor gets the final say whether you feel he is right or wrong. Give your input but remain professional either way.

Photos copyright The Decatur Daily. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

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.)

Answer a question for me. What do you think the primary role of the dominant photo is on a newspaper page? The answer to this question lies in the very heart of your photo editing philosophy. There are a couple of answers and your journalism background will probably have a lot to do with what you think. I have seen a couple of philosophies in operation at The Decatur Daily. The first philosophy reflects the idea that story is number one and the edit should reflect story. The second philosophy is that visual presentation is number one and the photo’s primary purpose is to draw the reader into the page.

Let me say that both of these are valid ideas about photo editing. Secondly, there is probably no clear cut, black and white answer day after day. There will be times when there is not doubt that the dominant art on the page, be it a photo, a graphic or the headline, should reflect story regardless of the quality of the image. I believe this would apply to the A Section front most often and perhaps the Sports section front fairly often as well. In this situation, it would be a shame to put a photo out in the dominant position that was graphically appealing but failed to tell the story that needs to be told. The London bus bombing was a good example of this. The first news photos from the incident were taken by citizens with cell phones. The photos were terrible both technically and aesthetically but their importance in telling a story could not be denied. There are times when this photo will be an excellent, graphically appealing photo but there will be other times when it isn’t. Your news judgment must carry the day in this particular situation no matter how it galls you to use a lesser graphic image.

The second philosophy involves using the most graphically appealing image to draw the reader into the page. The argument for this philosophy is very straightforward. If the dominant element on the page does not stop the reader and grab his attention he will simply turn the page and not read the story no matter how well it is written. This must apply to each section front from time to time but is especially true of the feature section fronts and the local section fronts. Really big news kind of sells itself. When 9/11 happened it really didn’t matter what ran on the first day because everyone in the nation was going to read the story to glean as much as possible from the situation. However, when you have a feature section front, and this includes the sports pages on many days, the reader needs a good reason to stop in and stay a while and an excellent photo is the calling card. In this case it is a shame to allow anything other than you best shot to carry the page.

The trick is in balancing the news value of a photo against its aesthetic value and coming up with the best dominant photo for your page. I remember a situation a few years ago where we had an apartment building on fire. Two photographers showed up and turned in images. One shot showed a firefighter on the top of the aerial ladder framed in a swirl of flames. The other photo was a wide shot showing the entire building with the ladder truck with ladder raised. Both were true documents of the scene. The second shot was selected to run. IMO that is missing the forest for the trees. A disclaimer is needed here. I hate scene shots and I especially hate scene shots that run dominant. I always want emotion and visual impact to lead the page. I think that we sometimes miss the forest for the trees.

Once in a while you come back with a shot that covers both editing ideas. It is an excellent visual that also tells the story perfectly. Oh for the planets to align like that all the time! When everything comes together you have a home run and it will run most every time and it will run right most every time. Those are the easy days and it would be great to have a few more of them.

The other problem one runs into is the fact that photo editing is so subjective. There is no guide book that tells you this is the photo and this other one is not. What one person sees as a great photo another will look at and just flip on past. This makes photo editing more art than science and the really good photo editors use guru like skills to draw out the best photo from a shoot and they play it well on the page. Most of us are not guru like wizards and we have to struggle between two opinions. The best thing to do is settle your photo editing philosophy in your own mind and then use your philosophy as the baseline for your photo editing decisions. We like to say in the church that if you don’t believe in something you will fall for anything. That’s the way it is in photo editing. Have a firm idea in your mind and build your editing skills from that foundation.

The top photo in this post is one in where the planets aligned. Not only is it a really nice jube shot, but it also has the key players from the team celebrating. These kids had just won the football state championship and were rushing the field to receive their trophy. The second photo is one where the impact carries the day. This lady did not win the golf tournament. She was in a putt off for a closest to the pin award and her reaction is to the crowd reacting to the lady putting. She could not watch the putt because that would give an unfair advantage. All she could tell about her opponent was the crowds reaction. Both of these photos ran and both illustrate a couple of ideas about photo editing.

Photos copyright The Decatur Daily. The opinions in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

I have been extremely busy for the last few weeks (explaining the drop off in blog postings) and the busy has been compounded by being the temporary boss while my boss is on vacation. That has given me several opportunities to contemplate photo editing and to participate in the editorial budget meetings and watch others who are not trained in photography or in photo editing edit photos. For all of you who work in small newspapers I know you are already visibly cringing. I know that my guts have been churned more than once recently and it has caused me to stop and think about editing and I think that I will do a few posts on the fine art of photo editing. I want to keep this pretty straightforward because some of you guys may be word editors or have very little exposure to photo editing in the newspaper world.

I am coming at this series of posts assuming a couple things. First of all that the photographer is not working directly under the supervision of a photo editor. That would be the case for most small newspapers and for some mid-size newspapers and maybe even a few large newspapers. This means that the photographer is the first editor in the chain of command. Some of the time, we consult one another as we edit a job but we don’t have a photo editor who looks at the take with us and helps, or just flat out makes, the editing decisions. At The Decatur Daily, we generally edit a shoot down to between two and six photos for news and sports and up to about eight to ten photos for living. As a disclaimer here, some sports jobs require significantly more images and we may send thirty to sixty images back.

The second assumption is based on the first. Since you don’t have a photo editor, word editors or even the layout editors are the ones making final image selections. This may or may not include input from the photographer. At The Daily, we have what I would term limited input into the photo editing process. There is no polite way for me to express my personal feelings about this so I will leave that alone. Obviously, there can be a little frustration for a photographer in the process.

Lets begin at the beginning, editing your take. If you remember when we talked about assembling your portfolio, I said that you should hit ‘em hard and hit ‘em often. When you edit your take you need to remember this. You want your lead photo to really sing. There may be several really nice photos from a given assignment and it is tough to edit your own work so how do you find THAT photo? Think about the purpose of photos in the newspaper. Photos are the strongest visual element on a page and all kinds of research indicates that readers will move on quickly if the photos or the headlines do not pull them in. When you edit, look for the picture that has the power to draw the reader into the page and hold them there. Look for things like expression, emotion and impact in your images with people. Composition is also useful in helping hold the person’s attention. Lines that lead the eye into a photo and hold it there are excellent visual tools.

You also must keep in mind the story. You may have a great photo that has little or nothing to do with the story. The photo may really sing but if it doesn’t relate to the story it will never run. Hold it out for a standalone if you can. If not, you just have to pass on it. I am not an advocate for the idea that the person in the reporter’s lead has to be in the dominant photo. That is such a handicap to excellent visual reporting that I need not say more. It is a double bonus if your best image also has the person in the reporter’s lead; however, I don’t think that is a prerequisite for a lead photo. If you turn that reasoning around you can see how illogical it really is. What if you made the reporter rewrite his story so that the person in the dominant photo is the one he must have in his lead paragraph? See, it doesn’t make sense. Okay, I’m stepping down off my soap box now. But you still have to tell the story.

Look at the readability of the photo objectively. This means you have to pretend that you don’t know you had to outrun a pack of starving wolves, fjord a creek and climb a tree to get the shot of the mayor kissing the baby. The reader won’t know anything about what you went through to get the picture, he will only know if it grabs him. Objectively then, does the photo stop you? Are you compelled to ask questions about the photo? Does the photo cause an emotional reaction? Now you are getting it. Oh, and you usually have to do all of this really, really fast. There is a deadline you know! Oh, and there is usually a page editor standing around wanting to know why the photo wasn’t done two hours ago. Did I mention that there will be three or four other people giving you stuff to do at the same time?

Final question for this post is will the editors/readers understand the photo? I have seen some really excellent photographs that are simply too complex for anything other than a museum where the visitor has time to contemplate the meaning of life and stuff like that. In the newspaper world, you have to be a bit more direct. In other words, punch the reader in the face visually, not literally. Of course not literally. Well, maybe a couple of readers, NO, I am under control. I will only punch visually! Really! Back to the point. Make sure the photo can be read and understood in the micro-second world of instant communication. Folks are digesting the news quickly these days so don’t give them visual heartburn.

I am including several pictures from one recent assignment. It is the season of giving and lots of people are helping others have a Merry Christmas. This job had Daisy Scouts and Cub Scouts packing gift boxes for less fortunate folks. I am only going to need one photo from this job so give it your best shot. I have edited a take of about 35-40 frames down to these five. Find me a lead picture and post your pick in the comments. Have fun and don’t worry too much about that editor breathing down your neck.

Photos copyright The Decatur Daily. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.