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Do you crop your photos?


I cut the paper to square before I print when working with the Hasselblad photographs. [Most of the time]
 

I do not bother to print the rebate, but I do get a laugh when a color image has a Tri-X or HP5+ rebate or a black & white print has an Ektar 100 rebate.
 
 
hoffy said:
But, but, how do you include the film rebate in your final image to show your other cool friends that you are edgy and shoot film?
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Just look for the hard water marks, the fingerprint, and the scratches from when I dropped it in the bathtub trying to get it on the hanger to dry

The real question is, how the hell did this topic accumulate 400 posts? Geez man. Either you do or you don't, and the reason for that is "Because that's what I want to do." How much more is there?
 
Moose22 said:
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The real question is, how the hell did this topic accumulate 400 posts? ...
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Not difficult with people chiming in on how long the tread is!
 
Take out 2 posters and I'm sure the post count would be half lol.
 
"And your father smells of elderberries!"
"Now go away or I will taunt you a second time."

Then there is Life of Brian...but I swear the best part was post-movie when some Archbishop and a couple Pythons debated about the movie on TV.

Sometimes we are treated to the bits and pieces that were cropped out of a movie...including the $$-generating "Extended Version" sort of thing.

I contact print full frame, obviously from my input so far. My pt/pd prints tend to show the black rebate plus a little more black, but not always. A series of images might look better cropped to the image area by the matboard...and this is also how I usually present my carbon prints. If by odd chance one survives for a hundred years or two ( a decent chance of one or two going into a collection somewhere), a historian or photo enthusist can lift up the mat and see the entire negative printed. No big deal -- but even now we talk about looking at the proof sheets of past photographers. It is just kinda nice to know they'll see the whole burrito.
 
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Alan Edward Klein said:
My understanding is that photographers would often submlt two pictures, one horizontal and the other in portrait format just in case it gets selected for the mag cover.
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The smart ones would. I was admonished in a professional nature photography symposium to take more verticals because the editors can never get enough of them. It’s also where I heard (from William Neill who shot 4x5 Velvia) that the person with the biggest chrome gets the sale. (Galen Rowell proved to be the exception)
 
faberryman said:
I don't think anyone is disputing that you sometimes win a prize when you go on a scavenger hunt. By the way, is that really the amount of grain you get when you enlarge 6x?
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Looks more like 60x maybe a typo
 
faberryman said:
I sometimes think about Penn and Avedon. I have seen their work in shows at galleries and in museums, and in books, but I don't think I have seen their work as it appeared in Vogue, other than for a few covers.
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Penn and Avedon shot a lot of 2-1/4, that work would have to be cropped for covers, spreads and full pages. Covers bleed, too, so even if they shot 4x5 or 8x10, the image would have to be cropped. And it would be the art director or editor in most cases would would determine the cropping, certainly no-one in marketing.
 
markjwyatt said:
"...English pig dogs..."

Schweinehund. Pretty bad in German.
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When we get to talking about Monty Python, I cannot help myself. Here is a cropped photo:




Graham Chapman - KMET - September 21, 1980
 
faberryman said:
I don't think anyone is disputing that you sometimes win a prize when you go on a scavenger hunt. By the way, is that really the amount of grain you get when you enlarge 6x?
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Yes. Grain is lovely!

MattKing said:
There probably are publications where the photographer will know ahead of time what the crop will be - LP record album covers come to mind - but in most cases you are at the mercy of the art director or other person who actually makes the decision.
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Speaking of LP, I did a shoot for band in their forthcoming LP and we made one shot for the inner spread, I visualized the needed "two squares" while shooting. I shot it on 5x7" with 90mm Super Angulon - what a marathon that was I will share the album art when it is out, so keen to see it!
 

That's right, but as much I want to visualize, I can't conjure up what will happen once I handel over my photo's, as most of the time the text isn't ready or even written and what photo, out of the bunch I gave them, will be chosen. In almost all these situations, editors handel to the hunch of the moment...
In the majority of the cases, I have never seen or known what would happen with the images I made before I toke them.
But there were a few exceptions, in about the 70 books for which I made the photo's, only for 14 of them, I was the one who was allowed to determine how the final lay-out wold look, and of which only 4 I could solemnly decide on the concept...
Some times I even didn't know that my pictures would (re-) appear in magazines, particularly when the book publisher held a hand on the magazine publisher, or vice versa...
 
hoffy said:
You forgot tears of desperation and disappointment.... Or is that just me
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Not just you. I think the salt in my tears is what cases the hard water spots.

Seriously, the first time I pulled a strip of film out of the spiral after developing I was amazed that there were images. I hadn't developed film in nearly 40 years, so I was feeling really smug up until I fumbled the hanger trying to get it on the wire I'd strung in the bathroom. SO deflated. Couldn't I wait until after I'd at least gotten them dry and had a look at them? They were junk shots, nothing that mattered, but still it's like fate saying "no, sorry, you can't have a 100% win the first time around."

I didn't even bother to use the photoshops to take scratches out of the scans. Just told people "hah -- yeah, that's where I scuffed the film being stupid." Wish I could say that's the only time I'd done something silly like that, but such things sometimes happen.

Nobody cares what my photographs look like but me and a very few friends, and they know the difference between sharpness of focus or good composition and technical errors. Maybe it'd be nice if more people saw my photos printed, but for junk I post online... It's liberating, I do what I want.
 

It was a first step. The next will be better. None of us got everything right at first.
 

I've still got that first home processed roll in the archive, sitting pride of place on the bottom of that particular roll. It got bent, scratched, drying marks and dust. But its still there and its still part of my journey.

My biggest issue is that 14 years in to my film photography rebirth (lets face it, most of us here are old enough to remember when it was the only thing in town), some of these issues have now crept back in. And I know, that for some of them, its not of my personal doing (I have lost faith in my personal favourite 120 film, FP4+).

Hah! Ditto - half the time, even my wife just has a cursory glance and goes "that's nice" and moves on. So, yeah, I do what I want (but even now I am at a cross roads, I need a new direction).

Anyhow, aren't we supposed to be talking about cropping? I grew up on a farm. I know a bit about cropping.
 
Here's a fairly extreme example of cropping that I've just discovered. It's from "English Cottages and Farmhouses", a collaboration between historian/writer Olive Cook and her husband, the photographer Edwin Smith. The book as a whole is wonderful, although I wish the page size was larger and that the photos were less cruelly handled. The original of the one at bottom right of this page can be viewed here. That comparison is extreme enough, but Smith did another, wider version with a seated figure, which can also be seen here. It's wonderful. Why in the world would anyone use less than that full picture?
 
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