Cropping images

One of the easiest ways to improve your photography is with careful attention to framing of your images. Try looking into the corners of the viewfinder to see what there is. Does the image need all that background? Perhaps you can you get closer to your subject or zoom? Does the picture look better as an upright or landscape setting?

One of the most common mistakes people make when taking pictures is not filling the frame with the subject matter. For example, if it's a photo of someone waving from the doorstep, let's just see that person and the door, not half the houses in the street with a small person-shaped blob in the middle.

The culprit for this phenomenon is the focusing aid in the centre of the viewfinder of the camera. All cameras have some sort of circle or rectagle etched onto the glass and we are inclined to think, in our less thoughtful moments, that this is the whole image. Glance around the viewfinder to see what you have got at the edges and especially in the corner areas. Look out for clutter in the background, and that lampost growing out of granny's face. Ensure that everything in the viewfinder is there because you want it to be there.

Landscape or Portrait? Many people never, ever turn their camera on its side and shoot an upright image. It can be a little awkward to hold until you get used to it but, what a difference it can make to the image. When you are taking a picture of one person then it is essential to shoot it upright, you waste so much of the picture area at the sides if you don't do so.

A typical snapshot is miles of coastline with a pink blob in the middle of it (the girl being photographed). By turning the camera on its side and moving in a little closer, this gives us a much better picture and we can still see enough background to get the message that we are by the sea. If you can imagine the original dimensions, the girl is ten times bigger in the second photo.

When you are shooting landscapes, you will find that, sometimes, the picture will look more dynamic with an upright image. With every picture you take, ask - should this be an upright or a horizontal shot? The answer is obvious and dictated by the shape of the composition but sometimes, for instance when the composition is square, the best choice is not forthcoming. Then take two pictures, one of each type.

Whenprinting your own pictures then you get a second chance to get the cropping right but, don't rely on this to make up for sloppy camera method. When you crop your pictures afterwards in the computer or in the darkroom, you are throwing away quality of the image. This will be wasting some of those precious pixels that you paid so much for in the first place. Now what's the point in having a camera with ten million pixels if you are only going to use five million of them?