Mrs and Mr S get cropped as they argue about possible “rules” for cropping...it’s about what you want to say, says she.

He, like Monsieur Bresson, advocates composing in the camera, that’s what zoom lenses and your legs are for, he says.

What about that picture of that leeds’ bus you cropped that?! She had suddenly gone black and white and sensed intellectual victory.

The bus was moving away and I had only nano seconds to act, he spluttered.

Hmmmmmmm, she said

The picture of Bamburgh shoreline and castle below could be cropped in a number of ways all of which would make sense or impact or meaning.

Not every crop is equally successful. Which do you consider the most and least successful?  

Of course Paddy might say that with a zoom lens you might make all these cropping decisions “in camera” and have them at full resolution too, but I say that these alternative ways of seeing don’t always pop up at the time and furthermore not everybody has a big zoom lens on their camera.

A single photograph can be cropped and treated in a variety of ways and then made into a flash file and you can even add music so that a single image demonstrates to the examiner your cropping and Photoshop skills as well as your sense of how photography can very elegantly construct the world. The Flash gallery below has been made from a single photograph of a beach scene in Northumberland. Note how the pace of the slow dissolves is echoed by the song which is about the sea, which in French is a feminine noun.