Improving Your Photos With Cropping
Most photographers that have been practicing for a few years or more have had the experience of going through old photos and applying new post-processing skills to breathe new life into them. I find myself cringing at all the things I did wrong whenever I’m scanning old folders of mine. Some mistakes can be fixed with a little Lightroom magic. One of the simplest things we can do to save a picture that we might otherwise trash, is to crop. This really applies to any photos though, not just our old ones.
This is probably my favorite photo from my trip to Vancouver Island 10 years ago. As a beginner photographer, I made a lot of mistakes with my photos, but some of them I was able to salvage using one of the most basic post processing actions. Today, I’m going to go through a handful of photos that I was able to save through thoughtful cropping.
Cropping seems so simple that I don’t blame you if you doubt its ability to help a bad photo much, but if you take a moment to think about it, you realize there’s so much that it can fix. Zooming in can give us a brand new composition, and often provides the opportunity to reduce empty space, eliminate distracting elements, and recompose for better balance or other compositional components. I decided to challenge myself to find at least five photos from just one trip of mine that I took exactly a decade ago, when I was just starting out with photography. A backpacking trip on Vancouver Island’s West Coast Trail in September of 2013 was one of my most memorable adventures, and filled with awe-inspiring scenery, but now 10 years later I look back and shake my head at most of my photos from there. I definitely didn’t do the views justice as a beginner photographer. I wanted to take some images from “cringe” to “shareable”, purely through cropping. To me, this would be a significant acheivement considering all of the things I did wrong back then due to lack of knowledge and practice.
Before Cropping. I almost trashed this image. It’s “blegh” to me, due to the lack of a clear subject, among other things.
After Cropping. “Zooming” into the “kissing” ravens makes them the clear subject, and the image better follows the rule of thirds.
Before Cropping. Empty space is a common theme I find in my older photos (not that I’m never innocent of this still today).
After Cropping. Converting to portrait orientation helped remove most of the unnecessary empty space, and I really like how the the sun rays are better highlighted.
Before Cropping. Let’s just ignore the fact that shots with slanted horizons were fairly common for me early on.
After Cropping. Besides correcting the horizon of course, I was able to remove the distracting trees on the left and create a more compelling composition by zooming in.
Before Cropping. We have multiple issues with balance in this image.
After Cropping. Removing the empty space on the right fixes those issues, and now the hikers balance well with the sea stack and trees.
Before Cropping. Once again, space and balance issues with nothing on the left, and lots of things on the right.
After Cropping. Converting to portrait orientation and removing the entire left side creates a better balanced image.
Before Cropping. One of those photos I wonder, ‘Why did I even take this!?”.
After Cropping. Sometimes, just zooming in to create a clear subject and recomposing around that will work wonders. To me this is a brand new image, and part of that is a level of mystery - are we in a skyscraper looking out at the plane, or are we outside of a building looking at reflective windows?
Typically, as beginners, we’re still in the mindset of most every other person who arrives to a beautiful scene, pulls out their phone, and takes a snap. There are plenty of things I would have done differently in these images to improve them aside from just cropping, but it’s shocking how something so simple can create a more compelling image from something we would otherwise discard. As we learn new things about composition and technique, we add new skills to our repertoire that can really elevate our images. While we can’t go back in time to apply all of those new things to our old photos, cropping can utilize several of our newer skills to correct mistakes made when taking photos.
