To crop or not to crop? Quite often I will crop my photos of small birds so that the bird is more prominent in the frame. This is especially the case when the background is cluttered.
Last Thursday, I captured an image of a male Eastern Bluebird (Sialia sialis) in which the background was not at all cluttered. The bluebird was perched on a the skeleton-like branches of a small tree. The composition of my image was more or less as you see in the first shot below, with the tree centered in the frame and lots of “white space” surrounding the subject.
What do you think? I cropped the same image closer for the second image below, with the bird now larger in the frame and pushed to the right a bit, almost following the “rule-of-thirds” guidelines. Do you like the second image better?
As a final experiment, I did a square crop that retained some of the symmetry of the first image, but chopped the branches off on both sides. From an artistic perspective, I like the first image best, but suspect that the third image might be the most popular with the majority of viewers.
So do you have a preference for one image over the others? Does the aspect ration make a difference for you? In case you are curious, the aspect ratios of the three photos were 3:2, 5:4, and 1:1. Different social media platforms display images differently, so the same photo might have a different “feel” when posted on different platforms. I know, for example, that Facebook will sometimes add a color border to the sides of some of my images or display the image with a crop.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.