Monday 22 August 2011

Crop Format - Portrait or Landscape?

With a lovely sunny warm Sunday, I grabbed a  few quick images from the garden yesterday.  This Common Blue was quite obliging for me - unlike the Red Admiral and Gatekeepers that I was hoping to get some decent images of.

This image came out reasonably well in the breezy conditions, resting on dead Knapweed.

I thought I would crop in the two formats from the same image and get your take on it.

Which do you prefer?  and why?




The landscape falls most comfortably on the eye to me, but as Dave has said many times before it is always worth getting your subject in both formats.

For the purposes of this image, the original was taken in landscape, and I have cropped accordingly.

Martin

3 comments:

  1. Hi Martin, for me they both work. The first has space at the side if you wanted to put in any text etc and the 2nd one follows the general vertical flow of the picture - if you know what I mean

    Robbie

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Martin,

    I email back and forth with Dave all the time.... To me the landscape (horizontal crop) is more appealing as it gives some breathing room between the antennae and the edge of the picture. Now the portrait (vertical) crop does show more of the weed. Both are good pics, and it is a matter of perspective. However, since most pics are landscape and that is what we become used to - the landscape is easier to take. the vertical (while a very nice pic) speaks to me of being taken from a camera phone, as all camera phones are vertical pics.

    Depending on the original, I may have not cropped the pic. Take this pic of a Monarch. cropping would have destroyed the composition. Note this was not take with a DSLR, rather a bridge camera as my DSLR is out for repairs.

    http://www.shervieuxphotography.com/Nature/Nature/18283486_mvM9zZ#1435461236_kCxZhMX

    IIf you really needed to crop, could you have done a slight combination of the two? Horizontal, but showing more of the weed? If you look around my galleries, the only ones I cropped were of the seahawk/osprey as there was a way too much white sky and I needed to crop to see more of the bird (can't wait to get me DLSR back, I now have a 2X teleconverter I am dying to try out).

    ReplyDelete
  3. Scott
    Looking at your monarch image i think some cropping would enhance the image, The butterfly is fairly central in the image with wasted space behind it, I would look at the rule of thirds, Take some off of the left and top, Removing the pink flower behind, Its not a bad image but i feel could be more dynamic,As a stock image its fine, Also note the difference in background between your image and Martins, Now i guess that you could say that your image shows habitat which it does but Martins would be more marketable due to the clean background, There are no distractions and its a nice clean image, The background could be used for text or just to show the subject off better

    Dave

    ReplyDelete