“Bondi beach” by Francisco Schmidt. download from flickr 2.1.2025 CC BY-NC 2.0.
“Bondi City” by Kristopher DeMarco 2.1.2025 CC BY-NC 2.0
I chose to work with an image of Bondi Beach in Australia. The original photo captured the entire beach with wide open spaces and a busy scene. While the beach itself is beautiful, the photo felt cluttered and chaotic with so many different things going on. There was no clear focal point and it was hard to know where to focus your attention in the image.
In my cropped version, I made significant changes. Instead of trying to capture the whole beach, I zoomed in on the buildings along the shoreline. I opted for a panoramic crop, which allowed me to tighten the frame and cut out the crowded beach scene. This focus includes the water but cuts out all the people and beach scenes. This made the focus entirely on the city building, creating a more structured scene for the viewer.
I applied the rule of thirds in my crop, positioning the buildings along the left vertical line to draw the viewers attention directly to them. I also avoided a centered composition to create a more natural flow, guiding the viewer’s eye form the building to the water. This created a better senes of balance in the image. Another feature I incorporated was the use of negative space to draw the attention of the viewer to the city. I cropped out a lot of extra noise that was distracting. This simplified the background to focus the viewers eyes on the city.
This cropped image transformed the busy, overwhelming original image into something more intentional and balanced. It focused the viewer’s attention on the architectural beauty of the city and its relationship with the ocean.
Hello Kristopher, nice to e-meet you! I absolutely agree with your cropping transforming the overwhelming crowds of people to a much more relaxing photograph of the gorgeous shoreline. The panoramic crop was a good choice! I’m not sure that I personally would do this option, but for an alternative crop, you could have done a 4:3 crop to similarly include the shore, the water, and the sky. A couple of suggestions for your blog post could be making your original photograph just a bit bigger (to be similar to your derivative) and perhaps in your citation for your derivative, you could have cited that it was adapted from the original photo. Have you been to Australia or did you just like this photo?
Good day, Kris!
I believe you did an astounding job cropping, adjusting the alignments, and recentering the focus of the photo you chose. As I scrolled through your post, I couldn’t help but feel relieved looking at the derivative from the original photo. The view slightly reminded me of my home island, St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, and it brought back memories of families playing in the sand, trying to soak up a little extra sun after being indoors. You chose a great photo to represent this project. I feel you could have even flipped the perspective from the city in the background to just the beach scenery with the occupants there. Overall, your work is impressive and evokes a sense of nostalgia and tranquility. Keep up the great work!
Hi Kristopher! This is a very unique take on this project. On a technical note, I wanted to point out that I believe that under your derivative you (may?) still have to cite the original creator, according to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/#ref-appropriate-credit. I’m a huge fan of the panoramic crop, and the way the clouds end right at the end of the peninsula is deeply satisfying. My only concern here is that it removes the balance of quality that the original photo has, where the foreground is slightly more pixelated. Unfortunately, there just isn’t very much detail in the background of the city so it’s difficult for my eyes to focus on any one point. That said, I have no other ideas for what a good crop could be here. Only, if you cropped the image in the opposite direction to the point where the sand/ocean meet the left edge, the water, sand, and grass would each take up exactly one-third of the photo, which would be satisfying to me. This would also appear much like “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” by Georges Seurat, which would be cool!