A good friend of mine, and a keen photographer, is very fond of the square presentation. I have always advocated looking hyper-critically at your own work to see if it might benefit from a crop but to be sure I hadn’t really ‘got my head around’ the square presentation. The working ratios of most cameras give a fixed format which generally looks good and works well. So what better reason to have a change?
I have offered up here a shot as taken from the camera, of a swirl pattern in the sand of a nearby beach, spotted and shot yesterday afternoon when the sun was setting. My initial impression was one of “well, it’s ok, but it sure ain’t going to set the world alight”. So I took it to a square format and, to me, the swirls are no longer drowned out by their surroundings but become the purpose of the shot, which really was what I wanted in the first place.
Cropping is just one more way to make your work stand out; to show your audience “That’s what I saw and wanted to share with you”.
It’s easy enough to do – I just cropped out the area that to me WAS the shot, went to image resize and made sure that length and width pixel counts matched.
I did keep the original of course in case, in ten years time, I change my mind 🙂
Uncropped version
Cropped version
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