A Tale of Two Crops

After recent evening walk with my friend and macro photography guru, Bryce MacQuillan, I shared some of my images with him through Facebook messenger. One of them was the above image of a white orb web spider.

His comments were kind and encouraging as always and he suggested cropping from the top to avoid the subject being on the bottom third. Looking at the image on my phone it seemed good advice to the point that I wondered why I hadn’t done that. This got me thinking as to why I had consciously cropped the image as I had and revisited it on my computer. This was the second version.

Viewed on a small screen like a phone or as a low res blog post this looks better to me. So why had I cropped the initial version as I had? The reason is that working on my 27in monitor the image is a lot larger and instead of being an image of a spider, it becomes an image of a spider with a face looking at you as though you are prey entangled in it’s web. The tension of the central composition with the face advancing toward you in the lower third was what I was after but it needs to be presented in a larger format to work.

We often speak of compromises in photography and one of the keys to determining which compromises to accept is based on intended output/presentation of the image. My default position is always as though I’m going to make a print and if I can try and capture some emotion in an image I will but that doesn’t always work for images viewed on smaller devices. This is a big part of the reason that my posting to Instagram has eroded. It seemed to need a separate edit/crop just to work on Instagram.

The delight for me with photography is that there is no right and wrong – it’s just a big open space to play and have fun. Analysing the how and why can add to that fun and can evolve what we do over time.

Sadly I know this post will trigger some emotion in at least one of my followers so I must apologise to my mum-in-law in advance. Sorry Shirley, I know you don’t like the spiders so here’s a bird for you 🙂