This image is of my older son at a karting track recently. At the end of the session the chequered flag is waved for each driver, and I was positioned to be able to get a shot of my son crossing the finish line and taking the flag.
In the original image, there is a lot of space all around the kart and flag, and the image looks messy and as if it was taken with little thought to the composition. It would have been better straight from the camera if I had been using a longer telephoto lens to lose the distractions around the main subject.
In the cropped version I have taken the image down to the important details - the main subject being my son, and I have included all the flag. Rather than your eye wandering around the image, it is now drawn straight to the driver and the flag. Cropping in this way has given me the image I wanted to take, but wasn't able to as I hadn't got the right lens with me.
This image is of a marigold from my garden. I enjoy flower photography and do a lot of this kind of work. I was pleased with the original image as it shows the layers of petals very well as well as the number of petals and the variation in their size from the outside in. It also shows the colour nicely.
I played around with several crops before deciding that this crop worked best. I have cropped down to the top right of the flower which has also allowed me to lose the slightly distracting colour in the background. By taking the image down to this crop the colour pattern of the petals is emphasised and the layering effect of the petals is high-lighted even more.By cropping in this way, we have lost the majority of the part of the image which was in focus, and this has created a lovely abstract. I do think that this crop gives a more dynamic image.
This image of a dandelion head was taken for Assignment 1 - Contrasts, and represented "Light" in "Light and Heavy". I like the original image with the small hand holding the dandelion, as it makes us fully aware that a child is blowing the "dandelion clock".
My tutor suggested, as part of improvements I could make to the image, that I make a square crop which removed the hand and showed the movement of the seeds. This is what I have done in the middle image. I do like the crop, and a square crop is not one which I would normally use. So I thought that I would try a 3:2 (approx) crop which I would usually go for. The bottom image shows this crop. I like this one as there is more space for the seeds to move into. Overall I think my tutor was right to suggest the crop, and I think that both the crops work well.
I enjoyed this project as it did make me look closer for pictures within my pictures. The karting image was an obvious one to use as I knew when I took it that I'd have to crop it. But I wouldn't have thought to look at the marigold picture with a view to cropping, as I was happy with it as it stood. But the crop does make a good image too. I knew I wanted to try and find another crop in the dandelion head image, as well as the one my tutor had suggested, and I was happy with the one I did find. Overall I do try and get my images right "in-camera" - comes from years of shooting film i think. This has been a useful exercise.
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