I'm very interested in everyone's views on this. I give you some examples, which of them do you prefer? Lately I have come to "not crop", I think the more you crop, the more of the composition (Art?) you loose.
first uncropped:
a little cropped
more cropped
tell me, what you think? M-L
I would love to be able to 'not crop' all the time, but sometimes we can't get close enough to the subject to get a decent picture. Especially on the forum if I posted without cropping there would often be a lot of leaves etc so that the bird is lost in the background. It is great to get a photo where everything is balanced and it all comes out looking great, I am so envious of some of the pictures posted here, they are really commendable.
Meave
I like the second one the best, mainly for the reason that in the first photo the bird looks less salient than the background bottlebrush, and the last one doesn't show much of the tree. I love how the leaves and branches form a kind of random pattern behind the bird.
I crop very often but sometimes don't need it. I only crop until the image still has acceptable image quality. My advice is to never crop so that the actual size of the image doesn't even take up the full frame of the image.
With your images M-L I would go for something somewhere in between the second and third image.
Here's my Baillon's Crake full frame
...and cropped to bring the bird larger in the frame
-
i used this example because this is just about the best quality I can get out of my camera and the cropping didn't affect the image quality.
In my view cropping is very helpful.
Cheers, Owen.
@ Meave
i agree exactly with that,its quite beatiful to see the bird in its natural surroundings
This is just my opinion . . . I think your third and most heavily cropped photo is more acceptable, considering that this is a bird forum it shows the birds features more closely and still shows some of the habitat.
I can't see any point in showing a bird photo where there is so much foliage that the bird is hard to find.
Jeanne
Brisbane QLD
Perhaps it depends on what you're trying to achieve, Araminta. I like to get a clear view of what the bird looks like but I also like to see the habitat in which the bird exists. In your example my preference is the 1st photo because I can see something of the bird's habitat but jaytee clearly prefers the 3rd because it gives a clearer picture of the bird itself. I think if the photo was of a species unfamiliar to me I'd probably want both!! Fortunately, I'm not hard to please.
For the best i.d. purpose and for those images where you like to really get to see the bird's profile; I go for cropped. If wanting to show habitat then include perhaps a second photograph entire photo.
Without the cropping tool, you will never find the birds in my photos lol
I don't thin cropping always reduces the composition value of an image, it can also enhance it. For example, you might have an very off-centre picture of a bird in flight surrounded by sky. I think the 2nd photo has a better composition than the first! You got rid of the unnecessary background features and focused on the sharper ones.
Taz