The box experiment
For this weeks Photo Challenge, I spent some time today wandering around with a cardboard box over the lens of my camera.
The idea was that by having a frame visible in the viewfinder, it eliminates the ability to crop the photo afterwards – forcing me to pay more attention to the composition of the shot before I press the button.
This a really interesting exercise, and found that I was setting up shots and then abandoning them – without wasting a frame - shots which I would previously have thrown out at the edit stage, or tried to rescue in post processing. It’s definitely a technique I’ll return to in the future.
As you can see from this shot of Ian, we probably looked a little odd wandering around the center of Bristol at lunchtime today (not that I’m saying Ian looked any more odd) it was a lot of fun though. I can see the lunchtime photowalk thing becoming a habit.
Anywho, that’s another challenge done. I wonder what the next one will be…
I never crop my shots in post processing. I stopped doing it some time in 1992 or so – partly because I liked the look of film edges on black and white prints, partly because I admire Henri Cartier-Bresson, and partly because I thought it might make me focus more on my shots and thus make me a better photographer (and, as a bonus, it makes life easier, because I am a lazy man).
One of my biggest problems with phone cameras has been that they are mostly 4:3, which just looks wrong. Fortunately, as always, there’s an app for that. Now my phone shoots 3:2 as well.
Slap some vignetting on it and put on a black frame and you’re done.
It’s odd. I hardly ever crop images I’ve shot on film (partly because of that gorgeous frame-edge thing) but I find I crop more often on digital.
Sometimes, like this shot an unusual aspect ratio suits the scene, or if I want a square image without having to faff about with my medium format kit.
So I think cropping is a relatively recent habit for me, and one I really need to make more of an effort to get out of!