Starting with something good

I’ve had a number of conversations with photographers and designers recently which have often revolved around the cropping and use of images.

Maybe it’s because of the flexibility of the digital image that makes some photographers so lazy. We can all manipulate our images to an unprecedented degree but just because you can play with an image doesn’t mean that you should.

When you’re looking through the viewfinder, you’ve got a pretty good cropping tool. I’d rather walk away from a shoot confident there’s a reasonable probability that I have some shots that worked rather than waiting until I’m back at the studio looking through a bunch of poorly composed, substandard, images hoping I can salvage something from what I’ve shot.

When you’re framing an image and getting ready to release the shutter you’re making a judgement and committing yourself to that moment. Pointing the camera in the general direction of a subject and putting it right later doesn’t seem to be the right way to go about it. There must have been something in what you saw that made you fire the shutter. Maybe it was the expression, the emotion, the way the light fell – if there wasn’t, why take it?