Friday, 29 April 2016

photography basics - How to crop this photo of water drops on a leaf to improve the composition?


I'm not a professional photographer. Neither I want to pursue a career in same. But I like Photography as a hobby. But I don't know how should I crop, what area should be excluded, how to make composition better (by cropping), once photo is taken.


Here's the photo:


enter image description here How can I crop and which areas should be excluded and what would be logic behind them?



Answer



To avoid having to crop it quite so hard as xenoid's example, I tried this...


I healed out the worst culprits - the grey at the bottom of the wall & the post near the centre. I could have done more with the black panel & post towards the left but I was just doing a rough job as an example.


enter image description here



Then isolated the subject by blurring the background.
That let me crop far less harshly.


enter image description here


It's not perfect, but it took less than 5 minutes.


As regards the logic behind my choice - firstly to remove the worst distractions; the pillar/doorway hard left & the ugly grey buildings in background, which there's nothing you could do with except crop out. Then the grey stripe [gutter, pipe?]
I did, however, leave a hint of the shape contrast between the two opposing diagonals - the wall & the leaf, which I kind of liked once it became overall less distracting.
That X-shape could work. Had the lines in the wall been cleaner, I wouldn't even have blurred it out.


The more I looked at it after I'd posted it, I decided I'd punch a bit of colour into it too... [this from the last jpg as I'd already thrown the project away]
I also recropped at a slightly different aspect ratio, which I think pulls attention to the foreground better.


I reposted the original below so you can quickly A/B.



enter image description here


enter image description here


No comments:

Post a Comment

Why is the front element of a telephoto lens larger than a wide angle lens?

A wide angle lens has a wide angle of view, therefore it would make sense that the front of the lens would also be wide. A telephoto lens ha...