Do you crop your photos?

Bill Burk · Jan 15, 2022

Pieter12,

That’s the crux. Nobody will care.

We owe our youngest generation of photographers a clear message. Crop or not it is your choice. You are the artist, it’s your standard. Unless you have a teacher telling you to show borders as part of the assignment, crop. It is the surest way to beautiful prints.

Henri Cartier-Bresson set an example of what is possible without cropping and we have contributors here (@NB23 and @cliveh come to mind) following in that tradition. They have taken many pictures and built that innate ability.

I took a different tack, it’s too late for me. I don’t care what anybody else thinks about my pictures. So flaws and all you see my borders. If I cared about attention I would post more pictures on Dogspotting because that’s where I get the most feedback. It feels hollow though.

Sirius Glass · Jan 15, 2022

MattKing said:
So in short, crop whenever you need or want to.

And the sooner the better.

Deleted member 88956 · Jan 15, 2022

Bill Burk said:
Henri Cartier-Bresson set an example of what is possible without cropping

Not exactly. His "keepers" were very low. It's a myth saying he never cropped. One might say he tried to only show uncropped frames, and then ... dropped the rest by the thousands. Another legend is he kept 100% control of what was released to the public. This is arguably true, and additional proof how many frames he needed to shoot before finding one he accepted for release.

It would have been just the same to say that anyone can show what is possible without cropping. But this kind of fascination with HCB just never wavers.

Vaughn · Jan 15, 2022

Pieter12 said:
I think there are a couple of ways to look at cropping. One, to fine tune a composition in the darkroom--exactly line up a horizon, for example or to eliminate an extraneous, distracting item along the edge of the frame. The other is to radically crop the image to home in on the subject, which may be lost or not well-placed as originally shot. Both are valid as far as I am concerned. Bad cropping or composition in the final print is unforgivable.

On the other hand I have seen some nicely-composed prints that bore the hell out of me, the lighting might be flat, the subject matter ordinary and ordinarily photographed, the image just unappealing. But it was composed carefully in camera and not cropped in printing.

IMO, good composition includes lighting, subject matter, and how the subject is approached. The prints you described were not "composed carefully in the camera..." It sounds like they might have been composed to formula (rule of thirds or whatever).

radiant · Jan 15, 2022

Sirius Glass said:
And the sooner the better.

110% correct.

Sirius Glass · Jan 15, 2022

Vaughn said:
IMO, good composition includes lighting, subject matter, and how the subject is approached. The prints you described were not "composed carefully in the camera..." It sounds like they might have been composed to formula (rule of thirds or whatever).

Or based on good training and experience, no rules are needed, just knowledge. For example, after setting up a large format camera, framing the subject, one merely needs to take another look in the view finder for unwanted objects and adjust the camera to correct for those invaders. See one does not even need to take a week long class to learn to crop before the photograph.

Pieter12 · Jan 15, 2022

Sirius Glass said:
Or based on good training and experience, no rules are needed, just knowledge.

Is there somewhere to see this enlightened work of yours?

faberryman · Jan 15, 2022

Pieter12 said:
On the other hand I have seen some nicely-composed prints that bore the hell out of me, the lighting might be flat, the subject matter ordinary and ordinarily photographed, the image just unappealing. But it was composed carefully in camera and not cropped in printing.

Yeah, there are a lot of lousy photographs floating around. No doubt about it. Since few people print or scan with the black border, there's no telling whether the images were cropped. The consensus here leads me to believe most were.

Pieter12 · Jan 15, 2022

faberryman said:
The consensus here leads me to believe most were.

Unless you have a filed-out or adjustable negative carrier, or are making contact prints, it is nearly impossible to make a wet print that is not at least slightly cropped. Any print that doesn't show the film rebate is cropped in this manner. I believe that except for the purists here, cropping is a more radical process--eliminating a larger portion of the original negative.

faberryman · Jan 15, 2022

Bill Burk said:
That’s the crux. Nobody will care.

We owe our youngest generation of photographers a clear message. Crop or not it is your choice. You are the artist, it’s your standard. Unless you have a teacher telling you to show borders as part of the assignment, crop. It is the surest way to beautiful prints.

Sounds like a mixed message. Crop or don't crop, but cropping is the surest way to beautiful prints?

MattKing · Jan 15, 2022

faberryman said:
Sounds like a mixed message. Crop or don't crop, but cropping is the surest way to beautiful prints?

Crop or don't crop, according to what the circumstances require. Being open to the tools available to you, including cropping, is the surest way to beautiful prints.
And there is nothing wrong with making choices at the time of exposure with an eye to minimizing the need for future cropping.
Or not - if you want to make rectangular prints from square negatives (or any other approach that mandates cropping later, go right ahead.

Bill Burk · Jan 15, 2022

faberryman said:
Sounds like a mixed message. Crop or don't crop, but cropping is the surest way to beautiful prints?

Cropping is the surest way to beautiful prints.

Save yourself. It’s too late for me.

I file my negative carriers and print black borders.

Not because I want beautiful prints. But because I have it in my head that to be brought back to the moment and re-live the experience, I must see every available part of the original negative. I feel I must see all there is to make me feel happy with the results.

I know it’s wrong but I am addicted. Save yourself. Crop.

Alex Benjamin · Jan 15, 2022

VTLD said:
It's a myth saying he never cropped.

I was also going to go there. There was one person, and one person only who was in charge of the narrative about who was Cartier-Bresson, what he did and how he did it, and it's Cartier-Bresson himself. After that, there is a lot of misunderstandings.

To say:

Bill Burk said:
Henri Cartier-Bresson set an example of what is possible without cropping

is quite misleading, because the "without cropping" is probably the least interesting and important aspect of Cartier-Bresson's work, and makes no sense isolated from the other aspects of the work. In other words, it's not the fact that he didn't drop that matters, it's the reason why. And that has everything to do with aesthetics, that is, the fact that, for him, everything within (and only within) the frame had to enter certain geometric relationships with each other, at a precise moment in time. Moreover, some of the graphic qualities are premeditated - we know he carefully chose his backgrounds in advance and waiting for things to happen - and others happen spontaneously, all in relationship one with the other.

Other thing is that Cartier-Bresson's artistic education was not that of a photograph, but that of a painter, his only teacher being French painter André Lhote, who transmitted to him his obsession with geometry - his students, it seems, had to go through what was called "purification exercices" by putting geometric figures on reproductions of masterpieces.

My reading is that Cartier-Bresson did not crop not because he felt some kind of moral duty to stick to the viewfinder, but essentially because all his life as a photographer - and he admitted so himself - he thought like a painter, and that the frame was his canevas.

Deleted member 88956 · Jan 15, 2022

Alex Benjamin said:
I was also going to go there. There was one person, and one person only who was in charge of the narrative about who was Cartier-Bresson, what he did and how he did it, and it's Cartier-Bresson himself. After that, there is a lot of misunderstandings.

To say:

is quite misleading, because the "without cropping" is probably the least interesting and important aspect of Cartier-Bresson's work, and makes no sense isolated from the other aspects of the work. In other words, it's not the fact that he didn't drop that matters, it's the reason why. And that has everything to do with aesthetics, that is, the fact that, for him, everything within (and only within) the frame had to enter certain geometric relationships with each other, at a precise moment in time. Moreover, some of the graphic qualities are premeditated - we know he carefully chose his backgrounds in advance and waiting for things to happen - and others happen spontaneously, all in relationship one with the other.

Other thing is that Cartier-Bresson's artistic education was not that of a photograph, but that of a painter, his only teacher being French painter André Lhote, who transmitted to him his obsession with geometry - his students, it seems, had to go through what was called "purification exercices" by putting geometric figures on reproductions of masterpieces.

My reading is that Cartier-Bresson did not crop not because he felt some kind of moral duty to stick to the viewfinder, but essentially because all his life as a photographer - and he admitted so himself - he thought like a painter, and that the frame was his canevas.

Good points. I usually argue HCB with statistics, which in his case are not accurate to start with. One number of negatives the world has never seen is around 10,000. As he was completely controlling what went out, there is no even semi-accurate account I know of, that attempts to estimate how many rolls of film he shot. Putting aside his painter's eye, the number of takes vs. takes approved appears to have been at best average, which applies to majority of photographers, especially in smaller film format, and I mean both, so-called pros and confident amateurs. None of this is meant to take credit away from many of his fine images, just a lot of up and coming photographers keep reading about HCB's miniscule fail rate, and the truth is he was in that respect same/similar/worse as most others.

Pieter12 · Jan 15, 2022

Alex Benjamin said:
I was also going to go there. There was one person, and one person only who was in charge of the narrative about who was Cartier-Bresson, what he did and how he did it, and it's Cartier-Bresson himself. After that, there is a lot of misunderstandings.

To say:

is quite misleading, because the "without cropping" is probably the least interesting and important aspect of Cartier-Bresson's work, and makes no sense isolated from the other aspects of the work. In other words, it's not the fact that he didn't drop that matters, it's the reason why. And that has everything to do with aesthetics, that is, the fact that, for him, everything within (and only within) the frame had to enter certain geometric relationships with each other, at a precise moment in time. Moreover, some of the graphic qualities are premeditated - we know he carefully chose his backgrounds in advance and waiting for things to happen - and others happen spontaneously, all in relationship one with the other.

Other thing is that Cartier-Bresson's artistic education was not that of a photograph, but that of a painter, his only teacher being French painter André Lhote, who transmitted to him his obsession with geometry - his students, it seems, had to go through what was called "purification exercices" by putting geometric figures on reproductions of masterpieces.

My reading is that Cartier-Bresson did not crop not because he felt some kind of moral duty to stick to the viewfinder, but essentially because all his life as a photographer - and he admitted so himself - he thought like a painter, and that the frame was his canevas.

I am going to go out on a limb here, and make an assumption about HCB's infamous "no cropping" statement. He was a photojournalist, and his work was intended for publication. So maybe he insisted that the editors not crop his photos, that they be used as presented. I cannot find the original statement he made about cropping, only one where he says that cropping a good photo can ruin it and cropping a bad photograph will not necessarily improve it. He is also reported to having said sharpness is a bourgeois concept and if god had wanted us to photograph with a 2-1/4x2-1/4 camera, he would have put eyes on our bellies.

warden · Jan 15, 2022

Bill Burk said:
Cropping is the surest way to beautiful prints.

Save yourself. It’s too late for me.

I file my negative carriers and print black borders.

Not because I want beautiful prints. But because I have it in my head that to be brought back to the moment and re-live the experience, I must see every available part of the original negative. I feel I must see all there is to make me feel happy with the results.

I know it’s wrong but I am addicted. Save yourself. Crop.

That was an excellent and poetic defense of the no-crop method. I also get a particular enjoyment out of printing images with the rebate, and for the same reason. I don’t do it all that often.

Alex Benjamin · Jan 15, 2022

Pieter12 said:
I cannot find the original statement he made about cropping, only one where he says that cropping a bad photograph will not necessarily improve it.

Yes, and people keep quoting that last part without asking the essential question: "What did Henri Cartier-Bresson mean by 'bad photograph'?". If the only "good" photograph is one that meets his own, personal, "geometric simultaneous coalition" principles, then, of course, cropping (or not cropping) becomes totally irrelevant.

Bill Burk · Jan 15, 2022

You will still need to compose and geometry is an important part of the work.

But to demand a great final composition in the camera places an unrealistic constraint on someone just starting out, when that outcome occurs more often with volume, experience and planning. You leave the beginner only to failure or luck.

Pieter12 · Jan 15, 2022

Bill Burk said:
But to demand a great final composition in the camera

Sometimes that great composition does not fit within the aspect ratio of the camera. If one can see the composition coming into view through cropping, even before tripping the shutter, then cropping in printing is just reproducing what you saw and envisioned.

logan2z · Jan 15, 2022

I posted a link to a blog post earlier in this thread that shows the original negative for HCB's famous 'man jumping over puddle' photograph and the crop that was used for the print:

https://greg-neville.com/2012/01/07/negative-secrets/

His quote about cropping is also reproduced in that post:

"It very rarely happens that a photograph that was feebly composed can be saved by reconstruction of its composition under the enlarger; the integrity of vision is no longer there.”

Alan Edward Klein · Jan 15, 2022

For the fun of it a while ago I took apart this 35mm slide to see what it looks like in all its glory. Those were the days when none of these were cropped. They just went into the projector as assembled by the lab.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/alanklein2000/48899520543/in/album-72157625526207614/

Alex Benjamin · Jan 15, 2022

Bill Burk said:
and geometry is an important part of the work.

Why? It was for Cartier-Bresson, and that, in turn, came from his artistic background as a painter. But it doesn't have to be. It wasn't for a whole bunch of great photographers of Cartier-Bresson's generation, and hasn't been for a whole bunch of great photographers since. Geometry is a possible element of composition, but it's not an essential one.

This insistance on geometry - well, not only geometry, but the combination of the rigor of geometry with the freedom of chance, which he got from the Surrealists with whom he grew up as an artist - give Cartier-Bresson's photograph an immediate, obvious perfection, and the temptation to imitate, or to, at least, develop his personal artistic choices as universal principles is very tempting (and, unfortunately, happens much too often).

Much more difficult to find the "perfection" in the non-geometrically-inclined compositions of Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander or Gary Winogrand, but it's still there, based on totally different principles. Should add that I doubt that Friedlander or Winogrand cropped much, but, if so, it was for very different reasons that HCB.

Pieter12 · Jan 15, 2022

Alan Edward Klein said:
For the fun of it a while ago I took apart this 35mm slide to see what it looks like in all its glory. Those were the days when none of these were cropped. They just went into the projector as assembled by the lab.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/alanklein2000/48899520543/in/album-72157625526207614/

I hate to say this, but even in they're heyday, slide shows were terrible, unless part of a good presentation. Today, I wouldn't sit through one if you paid me and tied me to the chair. The only reason for a slide was as an original for reproduction.
P.S. I spent a few years of my career running a 12-projector slide show sales presentation, with nearly 1,000 slides and an automated synchronized sound track.

Alex Benjamin · Jan 15, 2022

logan2z said:
I posted a link to a blog post earlier in this thread that shows the original negative for HCB's famous 'man jumping over puddle' photograph and the crop that was used for the print:

https://greg-neville.com/2012/01/07/negative-secrets/

His quote about cropping is also reproduced in that post:

"It very rarely happens that a photograph that was feebly composed can be saved by reconstruction of its composition under the enlarger; the integrity of vision is no longer there.”

Thanks for this. Loved this part: "In 1939, Cartier-Bresson destroyed a lot of his early work, including negatives...". As I said in an earlier post, HCB kept full control of the narrative about who he was as an artist and how he became to be who he was as an artist. I think he got a bit caught up in his own mythology about "the decisive moment", that is, the idea that you look, you look, you look and then, click, at the decisive moment, you hit the shutter. He probably came to that, with experience. His early works, brilliant as they are, show that he took many different shots - un-decisive moment shots - of a scene, and later kept the one he like most.

This takes away nothing from his genius, by the way. He might be, after W. Eugene Smith, the photographer I admire the most. But he is the last one I try to be inspired by.

Bill Burk · Jan 15, 2022

Pieter12 said:
I hate to say this, but even in they're heyday, slide shows were terrible, unless part of a good presentation. Today, I wouldn't sit through one if you paid me and tied me to the chair. The only reason for a slide was as an original for reproduction.
P.S. I spent a few years of my career running a 12-projector slide show sales presentation, with nearly 1,000 slides and an automated synchronized sound track.

I love slide shows, the ones I put on were always worth sitting through. Synchronized to music, pictures included experiences shared with friends in audience. I shot Kodachrome and Velvia (with a little Panatomic-X when I felt broke) 1978 through 1989. Must be where I got the impulse for not cropping. Only cropped a few slides with foil tape back in the day. Otherwise you just pick a better slide if there are problems with one. Shooting slides involved exploring a scene from a variety of perspectives. A couple wide angle shots followed by some macro studies.

Eventually I decided to switch to black and white for everything but the desire to not crop remained.

Do you crop your photos?

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