Why cropping
should not be forgotten

When I started to photograph, I got the habit of watching pictures in magazines, books, billboards, postcards and every image that I could have before my eyes. I’ve been to libraries, read about photojournalism stories, got to know the work of some great masters and admired the talent of National Geographic’s photographers.

This learning and long hours reading taught me that the good photographer is responsible for what he produces, for his final image as much as an artist for a painting.

It is said today that digital is making it easier to become a professional because we can just erase an image we don’t like: but this is a half-true. And half-trues are lies.

Today, as much as 50 years ago, the photographer is the one who has to control the quality of what he produces. One thing photographers need to have in mind is that if they are serious about their work, they have the final word/ total control over their production. That is, when using film, never to give away the negatives, responsibility and total control over cropping/dodging/burning-in. And when digital, ability to have the same control over the software, to retouch the proofs/prints until achieving the great level of a perfect print, to have the skills to upload the images to a professional lab or burn them on a cd to personally take to the lab. When having enlargements back, always check if they correspond to your quality pattern.

Neither digital nor film-based photographers can ever give up the supervision of their work. If using any services of somebody else, the control is up to us: if bad: redo and only give back to a client something we can be proud of.

That’s where cropping is being forgotten. Part of the photographer art is his selective eye when composing a picture: trained eyes usually see pictures without cameras. However, sometimes the situation presented before our very eyes are not exactly the one able to be caught. Cropping an image to present it better composed, reframing it on a vertical format or tight close-up is as important as editing the images before showing them to someone.

Photographers are better photographers because we study hard, read a lot, know other photographers to share experiences, take thousands of pictures, and learn how to accept criticism, make a lot of mistakes and learn with each of them. It’s a lifetime investment in the journey to our perfection. It’s a calling: I don’t know anyone who is a photographer and regrets to have accepted the calling. Or maybe it’s a disease: once we start, we can’t stop. But it’s always something we do from our hearts and with wisdom.

Nevertheless, the digital technology is not just a new gizmo that will make a photographer from every new user.

If digital has a merit, it’s the way it improves faster the learning curve for the ones who are dedicated to understand what they are doing. Cropping, to what concerns digital photography, will be on the priority list of any decent photographer who can see the possibilities of an image that is hid inside a frame.

Consider that you are in a  place or situation like the “one of a kind” and you have your last frame of your film to take a shot or your memory card is almost full and if you take time to erase something else, you miss the shot. What do you do??

Think about it. If cropping didn’t exist as an alternative, you would never have seen many images you had seen on magazines, especially the war pictures.

In a non-friendly environment, under stress and pressure, many photographers didn’t make the perfect picture. But they could explore their abilities in the darkroom to recompose and crop the picture that best expressed the moment they caught on film to tell the story. Moreover, they did it because they knew what they were doing. They understood the elements of composition that would make an image a great one instead of just “good”.  

Digital technology on photography has introduced the false concept that anyone could be a photographer. Photographers prove that digital can make anyone a snap-shooter. 

No, it’s not just “point-and-shoot”. It needs understanding colors, graphics, mood, film, color rendition, contrast balance, composition, and the famous “decisive moment” to capture. Furthermore, white balances, histogram, Photoshop, memory cards, new gizmos of the digital era in today’s world.

None of this helps if we throw away the art of cropping just because a new “toy” has been created to our joy. Cropping has become part of the tools that make a photographer a photographer…it trains our eye to see what is hid somewhere…it makes us rethink how could we do better that next time to have the final cropping in the original…it shows we become better as time goes by. And teaches selectivity: when we crop, we cut off what is not important, what is telling too much or is not significant to convey or illustrate the story we wanted to tell or the mood we wanted to express.

If you want to be a better photographer, maybe it’s time to resuscitate the old art of cropping and find the hid pictures in your old ones. If the masters did it, shouldn’t you?

Thee should not forget the art of cropping…cause sometimes the picture is there!!!