What's with no cropping?

I'll 'fess to cropping--and liberally on occasion....

Given that outside of a Tri-Elmar, Leicas are all prime lenses, I find myself in situations (esp. shooting musicians) where I'll use a certain focal length to get adequate coverage, but I know that I'll have to trim the picture to get the perfect "look." And sometimes even when I think a photo is perfectly framed at the time I took it, I'll look at it later, and decide it can be improved with a bit of cropping.

Hey, even Cartier-Bresson cropped his photos....
 
john neal said:
It's a conspiracy that is supposed to convince the audience that the perpetrator is as good as HCB, Robert Capa or (insert your photographic hero here....).
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Interesting that so far none of the "no-cropping-allowed" crew has weighed in here. Everybody crops. And funny how HCB has been referred to twice so far in this thread. He himself may have never cropped anything but that's because he didn't print his own stuff. I seem to recall that his most iconic image (the decisive moment of the man stepping over the puddle) was a very tight crop from the lower right of one of the worst negatives I have ever seen. And that crop was decided on by his printer.
 
Derriere la Gare Saint-Lazare

Derriere la Gare Saint-Lazare

Negative:

gare.jpg


Print:

cartier-bresson-henri-iza-gare-st-lazare-paris-1932.jpg


Enough said.
 
Amazing; there's some really hard-core contempt in this thread.

Yes, everybody crops.

All basketball players also miss hoop shots. But it's ridiculous to say that it's ridiculous for some of them to be proud that they tend to score clean hoop shots, and that in their drive to improve themselves that's what they aim for. And that is not an affectation.

Really, this thread so far is more of an inkblot sounding board than not.
 
Todd Frederick said:
Whats so sacred about a 24x36 format....or 4x5, or 5x7, or 6x9...or 6x6...........and on and on.

Cropping is a part of the photographic creative process.

Rigidly refusing to crop is just another manifestation of obsessive compulsive disorder !!! 😀
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Coversely though... why have an accurate viewfinder in your camera?
 
It's sometimes a form of self-defence against cretinous picture editors.Some of those guys will do ANYTHING, sometimes a lot worse than insensitive cropping. How about stretching a portrait (in Photoshop) on one axis, but not the other, to make it fit in the space he'd allowed for it?

Cheers,

R.
 
Sparrow said:
there's always a fundamentalist or two banging on about something ... sometimes it's cropping
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Sometimes it's apertures, sometimes it's a brand, sometimes it's digital B&W...but it's always something.

Sheez. Why does it often have to be reduced to The Red Sox vs. Yankees Goes Hooligan Show?
 
I dont think that you are going to find a direct an answer to your question beyond what you mentioned in your first post about photojournalism.

"(I suppose, if we are talking about photojournalism it makes sense to never crop since it could be construed as manipulating the information you are presenting.)"

I've read in a couple of old interviews that printing (film) uncropped and showing the black frame around the shot was a way for photojournalists to prove to one and other, and their audience, that their work was unadulterated and faithful to the original scene.

Outside of this context its preference. I like the way a black border looks when I print a negative, especially a sloppy filed out one - I think it adds a tingle of process to the look of the image. Others probably cant stand that look.
 
Roger Hicks said:
It's sometimes a form of self-defence against cretinous picture editors.Some of those guys will do ANYTHING, sometimes a lot worse than insensitive cropping. How about stretching a portrait (in Photoshop) on one axis, but not the other, to make it fit in the space he'd allowed for it?
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Careful, the Online Picture Editor Syndicate will come back and crop you, capiche? (Hollywood prononciation)
 
Gabriel M.A. said:
Sometimes it's apertures, sometimes it's a brand, sometimes it's digital B&W...but it's always something.

Sheez. Why does it often have to be reduced to The Red Sox vs. Yankees Goes Hooligan Show?
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It doesn't, I just don't like illiberal attitudes, I would say the same if cropping everything was held up to be a virtue ...
 
Walker Evans, my favorite photographer, once said he'd crop out 3/4 of the negative to get the picture he wanted. Of course he was shooting 8x10 then . . .
 
Sparrow said:
It doesn't, I just don't like illiberal attitudes, I would say the same if cropping everything was held up to be a virtue ...
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Some people shoot only film. Or only B&W.

I guess it'd be fair to ask of all (illiberally): What's with those B&W film-only people? Is it like riding your bike with the brakes locked on? Why must they negate the existence of color?

The world may never know.
 
I just don't like illiberal attitudes, I would say the same if cropping everything was held up to be a virtue ...
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Am I illiberal (to myself?) because I "never crop?" HCB was an anarchist as far as I know...
 
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t6un said:
Am I illiberal (to myself?) because I "never crop?" HCB was an anarchist as far as I know...
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He was once asked by a journalist what "anarchy" meant. Even journalists don't know certain words, you know? 😉 They don't know much, I guess...always asking questions. What's with all this question asking, I say.
 
I crop as needed just because I only have one lens & you can't always run accross the street with a toddler in a stroller dodging Manhattan rush hour traffic... on that note, I do have a psychological boundary that I'm not going to make my 35 'cron show a 75 or 90 field of view - I do try and get it right the first time.
🙂
 
aperture64 said:
HCB said this is one of two shots he took in his life that he knew he would crop, before he even hit the shutter. A rare example.
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and yet in the examples in the books I have they all show this print with the black border around it as if it had not been cropped
(he took the picture through a fence and part of the fence appeared in the left of the neg, however I would like for someone to tell me that they this picture or composition could possibly be improved by adding more of the scene if the fence had not been there)

As for Walker Evans.... he was known when working for the FSA or other times when the neg would be leaving him and he would no longer have control over it, to take a scissors and cut the neg down to the crop he liked..... now thats cropping

anyway Edward Weston said something to the effect that good composition is just the strongest way of seeing and methinks that does not always fit in a standard size box
 
I don't crop 35mm. For some reason I LOVE including frame boarders to the scan and darkroom prints with 35mm thus no cropping. Similar thing with 6x6. With 6x7, I'm usually filling the paper so slight cropping would happen then anyway. Digital, I do my best not to crop, but not as strictly as 35mm/6x6.

For 2009 & 2010, as my personal challenge, I did no-crop rule for flickr uploads but that was a "project" just for myself.
 
Gabriel M.A. said:
Some people shoot only film. Or only B&W.

I guess it'd be fair to ask of all (illiberally): What's with those B&W film-only people? Is it like riding your bike with the brakes locked on? Why must they negate the existence of color?

The world may never know.
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What answer would you expect from them? ... that which is not forbidden should be made compulsory?
 
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