Allow me to set the scene: imagine a windy day in October, cars are honking as they pass on narrow streets, between buildings whose age is reflected in their architectural design. As people walk by on the sidewalk they converse in in rapid French, and as you look around you see the juxtaposition of history and modernity in everything from the buildings, to the fashion, to the food!
This was what I saw and felt when I was fortunate enough to get to visit France with my partner’s family in October of 2023. As someone who’d never left the United States and had only recently started going on trips out of Florida, visiting France was an eye-opening experience. It certainly didn’t hurt that one of my favorite stories is The Phantom of the Opera!
Naturally, while I was there I tried to capture the moment in photos as much as possible; suffice to say that some were more successful than others.
Here is one such attempt. While you can see some of the unique architecture that so intrigued me, there is a lot going on in this particular photo.
For starters, my nail managed to sneak in at the bottom of the frame, causing some distraction. Beyond my nail-photo-bomb-faux-pas, this photo has a lot of empty space at the bottom where the road is. The traffic for the cars is going multiple ways, and despite how striking this building was to me, there’s too much motion around it to keep focus.
I would also say objects on the sides of the image, like that the street lights and the cut off bicycle change the ambiance of the photo, making it feel like I’ve cropped something out and that this was unintentional.
So, with a little cropping magic, I attempted to refocus the photo on the building that drew my eye initially.
In this crop I removed the most egregious error by cutting a lot of the empty space at the bottom. At first I tried to crop all the way up to the ground floor of the building, but that cut off the person on the moped, so I left them some space. Since this also zooms in the focus, you can see the green light, so it makes sense why there’s a little bit of empty space behind the cars that are driving forwards.
By also cropping the traffic going the opposite way it reduced some of the distraction of the photo, as both cars and people are walking around the building. To really draw focus to the building I tried to line up the center of the windows with the center-left side of the grid, so that it was de-centered.
I wanted to better capture the feel of the city as I remember it. By reducing a lot of the clutter around the photo it allowed me to focus on the smaller details, like the brown brick chimney on the building on the back right-hand side, or the people walking across the cross walk. Even the bright pink of the neon sign on the ground floor of the building peeking through the plant highlights the juxtaposition of past and present that was everywhere in Paris.
After this assignment I’ve certainly learned to appreciate the power of a good crop!
Hello Emily,
First off congrats on your first trip out of country! I just recently had my own first trip out of the states last summer in 2024. I got to visit Norway, Finland, and Germany, and had a wonderful adventure!
That being said, most of my pictures turned out a lot like your original; lots of extra space, accidental cut offs, and too much clutter. I like how in your new cropped version focuses on the focal building in the shot and how you described it as trying to make it like the way you remembered it.
I think that really fits with the whole tourist vibe; we love the experience so much that we try to capture what we experience in photos. Unfortunately, the majority of us are not professional photographers, so our photos don’t always look like how we remembered the experience in real life.
The cropped version of the photo, really focuses on the building itself and gets rid of the clutter and other distracting factors of the original so you can focus on what is important.
Hi Emily. Globetrotting is so fun and such a great experience to share with loved ones. I’m hoping you’ll get to experience more world travels in the future. I like how you cropped out much of the negative space with the roadway and your fingernail. The pink blur is the first thing that caught my eye, then the sky, and lastly the center building structure. Your cropping choice brings the middle building to the center of my attention in the photo. Then my eye wanders to the street and motorists traveling. Zooming in also allows me to see the intricate architecture of the building and balconies pictured. If I were to provide any suggestions to your cropping choices, it would be to crop out the bottom of the photo and have the bottom start where the right sidewalk meets the right vertical edge of the photo. I would next crop the top of the photo and remove the negative space sky, just above the center building. This would allow additional focus on the building architecture and its details. Thank you.
Hi Emily!
Paris looks gorgeous from your camera. I love how you cropped out the nail in the second picture. I am so incredibly guilty of having my fingers in so many of the photos. I also love the focus on the buildings and how they look in the street. I think that if you wanted to change the meaning, you could have cropped the photo to where there was an emphasis on the cars. This would give a busy paris street vibe to the photos. I love the architecture approach though. I think that your story behind it is so wonderful! (I too love Phantom of the Opera).