Composer or Cropper?

[Al Tee]

What are you?

Are you a meticulous composer of your images or are you like me, a 'serial' cropper!

I tend to see a vague image in my mind, fire off a few shots then kind of bodge & butcher it in photoshop in the hope I might obtain something presentable!

Just interested to see how people go about their shots..

Al.

[surfg1mp]

I really quite anal about this......

I hate having to crop, and most of the time the only time i do is if i have to correct lens distortion or a wonky horizon.

I definitely try to compose the shot rather than do it after in post. In my head its like why would i want to turn my 12 mp camera into say a 5mp camera depending on the harshness of the crop.

if i do crop, i will generally always try to use the shift key, so i keep the aspect ratio.

[Gidders]

I try to be like Lee ... but in practice I'm more like Al

[postcardcv]

I don't like cropping if I can help it but unfortunately more often than not when I look and the photos on the computer I then see how I should have shot it and end up cropping a bit. I am a bit obsessive about keeping shots in a 2:3 ratio, when doing paid work I only offer prints of this ratio.

[miketoll]

I try to compose and crop as much as possible in camera and do as little cropping as possible on the computer. I have it in my minds eye what I want even if I do not get it.

[Nigel G]

I can almost invariably find a better composition if I crop than the one I started with. So much so i normally leave a bit extra round what I want in case something better occurs to me afterwards.

[Roy C]

I mainly shoot birds where cropping is almost essential unless shooting from hides at 'statues'. I almost always use the centre point only and with flighty birds you have not got time to compose so most birds end up in the centre of the frame which mean you have to crop if only to make a decent compo. Also with birds the problem is always getting near enough so cropping can also help in that department.

[surfg1mp]

Originally Posted by Nigel G

I can almost invariably find a better composition if I crop than the one I started with. So much so i normally leave a bit extra round what I want in case something better occurs to me afterwards.

Thats a good tip Nigel, When shooting landscapes, i nearly always have to correct the barrel distortion so have to crop slightly. having that extra space would allow for this.

Originally Posted by Roy C

I mainly shoot birds where cropping is almost essential unless shooting from hides at 'statues'. I almost always use the centre point only and with flighty birds you have not got time to compose so most birds end up in the centre of the frame which mean you have to crop if only to make a decent compo. Also with birds the problem is always getting near enough so cropping can also help in that department.

Thats also a good tip roy, i have always wondered how you guys manage to get such great compositions when photographing flighty birds.

[yelvertoft]

Somewhere in between Al and Lee. Mrs Y is a die hard compose in camera and if you have to crop, you didn't do the job properly in the first place. I find that I leave a little bit to give scope to experiment as Mike suggests and allowing minor adjustment to the horizon or other distortions. Also, I find that leaving a little bit of scope to crop allows for the overlap of a mount if framing.

[robski]

Like Roy most of my subject matter is never still for more than a second or two and rarely frame filling so the focus is on getting the shot rather than accurate composition. At the end of the day if the subject can be cropped to give a good composition then that's a bonus.

So Peter are all your prints 12x18 or 6x9 ?

On the rare occasions I do try to compose in camera I try to leave a bit of slack for those minor tweaks. If I do get them printed they tend to be 7x5 or 10x8