{"id":10204,"date":"2015-09-29T09:42:59","date_gmt":"2015-09-29T13:42:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=10204"},"modified":"2015-09-29T09:42:59","modified_gmt":"2015-09-29T13:42:59","slug":"on-the-aesthetics-of-photo-cropping","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2015\/09\/29\/on-the-aesthetics-of-photo-cropping\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Aesthetics of Photo Cropping"},"content":{"rendered":"

The images from my new camera are huge– 6000×4000 pixels– so when I post them here, I need to re-scale them (in theory WordPress can do that automatically, but it’s never worked right on the rare occasions that I’ve tried). Since I’m opening the pictures in GIMP anyway, I generally do a little cropping and color-correcting. When I’m taking photos of the kids, it’s often hard to get them framed really well for the initial shot (they insist on moving<\/em> and doing cute stuff<\/em>…), so the cropping is sometimes very significant.<\/p>\n

One of the rules for composing photos that even a doofus like me knows is the rule of thirds<\/a>, which (loosely) suggests that it’s best to put important elements along the one-third lines of the image. And since I’m doing a bunch of image-editing these days, it’s striking to see how effective that really is. <\/p>\n

By way of illustration, I snapped a bunch of photos the other day of The Pip running in the late afternoon at a local playground. If I crop one of them tightly to just him, it’s… okay:<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The Pip running, cropped tightly.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But a wider shot, with him off to one side in a rule-of-thirds-ish sort of way, is much<\/em> nicer:<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The Pip running, in a wider shot.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The wide space to the left side of that gives you a better sense of the light, and somehow that makes his determined running more apparent and effective (he runs pretty much everywhere, usually in a pose that suggests he expects to need to break through a wall on the way to wherever it is he’s going).<\/p>\n

I’m not claiming to have discovered anything revolutionary here, mind; this is all well-known stuff. But it’s been interesting to see it play out as I edit all these photos. And also: look at my cute kid!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The images from my new camera are huge– 6000×4000 pixels– so when I post them here, I need to re-scale them (in theory WordPress can do that automatically, but it’s never worked right on the rare occasions that I’ve tried). Since I’m opening the pictures in GIMP anyway, I generally do a little cropping and… Continue reading On the Aesthetics of Photo Cropping<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10205,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,50,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-personal","category-pictures","category-the_pip","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10204\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}