Before:
After:
What Changed
To create a new image, I cropped out the figure on the left of the screen, the figure holding the phone, the parking garage, and a significant portion of the sky. In doing so, I put the focus on a phone and the photo displayed on that phone. I centered the new subject on the bottom left side of the photo to allow room for the hand holding the phone and the beautiful sunset in the background. I wanted to leave those because I felt they made the image interesting while still allowing me to draw to user’s focus to something new.
The Change of Focus
The photo above went from a photo of a girl taking a picture of her friends to a photo of a phone with girls taking a picture. Slightly confusing, I know. The subject of the original photo is the brown-haired girl. Your eye as a viewer is drawn to her and what she is doing. It is almost as if you filter what is happening in through her perspective. You see a girl who is enjoying a sunset with three of her friends. She is clearly smiling as she turns the camera unexpectedly to the girls behind her instead of the beautiful sky in front of her. It captures a goofy, lively moment.
The cropped photo tells a story from the perspective of a cellphone. The phone tells of two girls quickly trying to capture the sky before it fades away. With multiple subjects cropped out, it no longer feels like a group hangout and you no longer see visible smiles. The photo as a whole seems far more focused on artistically capturing a photo within a photo than capturing a moment between friends (as it did previously). The story is more about what is happening than what emotions are present.
Cropping Concepts
- Crops the photo to tell a (different) story 🠮 (From a goofy moment to an artistic moment)
- Crops to Change or Emphasize a Focal Point 🠮 (From the brown-haired girl to the subjects on the phone)
- Leaves out unnecessary details (simplifies the background) 🠮 (Removes the girls in the foreground and the parking garage)
Hi Corinna, I thought your choice of photo interesting and I definitely understand why you chose to crop it the way you did. The before pic is a bit confusing like you said because you don’t see the person taking the pic in the selfie so it looks like she’s taking pics of her friends behind her. It’s a very creative shot. In your after pic you can’t tell who is taking the picture like your caption states. It’s quite mysterious because you can see the hand has a black long sleeve but neither of the girls on the phone screen are wearing anything like it. I think your derivative is actually more creative than the original picture. Nice work!
I am not sure that I would have made anything else the focus either because other than the woman there isn’t much else to focus on in the original photo.
On first look of the original picture, it looked like the main person pictured is just taking a picture of a sunset from a high location and is the main focus of the picture. However, upon looking into it more closely, I noticed that there is someone else in the photo via the front facing camera of the phone being used to take the picture. After seeing the cropped picture, I feel that it does change the meaning of the original slightly in that it’s primary focus is the person taking the picture on the phone screen. Additionally, the cropping here seems to be good since there aren’t many other elements to become the primary focal point. The only improvement I can say is that in the cropped photo, the subject seems to be a bit small and difficult to focus on. But overall, I enjoyed your posting!