Cropping: Getting the Most Out of your Photos

1. Cropping: Getting the Most Out of your Photos

2. Tip 1: Decide what’s in or out.As a photographer, your choice of framing is how you indicate what you think is important. In your decision of where to place your frame, you choose what to include and exclude from the picture. You should include only those things that contribute to your story. Anything that doesn’t strengthen your image actually weakens it. Don’t try to put everything into one composition!

3. Tip 2: Eliminate distractions. It’s human nature to direct your attention to your subject, and to ignore, or mentally filter out, everything else.

4. Tip 3: Watch the edges! Most photographers, especially those just starting out, concentrate on what’s in the middle of the image.

5. Tip 4: Avoid the bulls-eye. Where you place the subject relative to the frame helps to move the viewer’s eye around your composition, and creates balance between the elements in the frame

6. Tip 5: Find the Picture inside the Picture.

7. Tip 6: Create shapes. Where you place the boundary of your frame actually creates shapes in your picture. Having only one kind of shape repeated in the image (e.g., several rectangles) makes a stronger image than a mish-mash of shapes (e.g., a circle, a square and a triangle).

8. Tip 7: Change The Orientation. Turn a horizontal photo into a vertical one and vise versa.