Jane Barrager

Excursion by #Sacho# is licensed under the Creative Commons License
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

While browsing through numerous images, my attention has been captivated by this particular photo, from which I can’t look away. What a beautiful and romantic scene it is. A man sits in the car, smiling as he looks at the beautiful girl on the street, who is like a princess. Beside the girl, a cute dog is also looking at the man. They are both basking in the amber glow of the setting sun, as if they are subjects of a living painting.

However, due to the composition of this scene, the bottom part of the street takes up too much space. You can also notice there are many bright highlights on the street, which draws my eyes to that area and away from the characters. I believe the theme and focus of the scene should be on the portion from the girl to the car, but they are too small and far away from me. Therefore, I performed a crop and re-composition on the image.

Love Story by Tianhao Liang is licensed under the Creative Commons License 
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

This love story image is my re-composed work, mainly utilizing the concepts of ‘Crops to Change and Emphasize a Focal Point’ and ‘Leaves out unnecessary details’. This image removes the original photo’s lamp and most of the street, which redirects the narrative focus squarely upon the characters of our scene. Now, they are closer to us and we can see the man’s smiling face clearly. The sunshine on their body is more obvious and warm.

The power of composition can let the audience enter the photo’s world and feel the emotion immersively. Free from extraneous distractions, our imaginations are invited to wade into their silent dialogue, to speculate upon the subtle play of expressions and the rich tapestry of untold stories. Time seems to stand still at this moment, as the scene becomes eternal.

A few years ago, I was asked to take some promo shots of my husband’s band at this really beautiful wedding in Simmesport, Louisiana. The band had also asked me to get some shots of people dancing and enjoying the music, in which I had no problem doing at all! Most of the dancing took place on this boardwalk you see in the picture above. The band started playing a slow song, and the mother and father of the bride took to the dance floor, and I was able to capture this lovely moment between the two of them.

I thought I was being clever trying to get the band playing while the couple was dancing, but I remember being in a very awkward spot trying to get the photo. Plus there was a bunch of people at the end of the boardwalk, and did not want to get in the actual wedding photographer’s way! However, when I look back at the original picture, my eye has no where to go. There’s also nothing in the forefront, and everything is on one plane. Personally, I think having the band in the background (no offense to them, they’re amazing!) takes away from the moment. Cropping the band out gives the photo a little more depth. It also tells a different story about the couple. With the band, it looks like they are definitely dancing, but without, it looks like she may have found out some good news, or maybe he just told her something sweet.

When we think back on the past few years spent in the pandemic we think about the time spent away from people, our smiles hidden behind mask, looking for ways to stay connected to people. The way I have cropped this photo¹ you would think you are seeing a girl in 2020 getting some air (through her mask) trying to stay connected to her friends while social distancing. What if I told you she was not alone though?

In the original photo you can see that the girl featured was actually surrounded by her friends in a socially distanced hangout. Just because she had her mask on and was on her phone didn’t mean she was alone. When you don’t know the other people are there you assume she was alone². When looking at a photo you never know what the camera didn’t capture.

I Chose to make these edits not only to tell a different story but to also enhance the apeal of the image. In the original there was no main focus and the rule of thirds was not considered. there are also many distractng objects in the original, the cup, hand sanatizer and football along with the partial capture of a fourth person all pull focus from the others.

1. “Social Distanced” By Alexa Lowry ↩︎
2. “Together Again” By Alexa Lowry ↩︎

We celebrated Mother’s Day 2023 with family and friends. My aunt was being installed as a mother at her church that Sunday, so several of us decided to surprise her and attend church service. After church we went to brunch and the picture is one of many we took outside the restaurant. The picture is of my mother and daughter. By cropping the picture, I was able to take away the distractions in the background. The dark color car in the parking lot you can barely see and not much of the railing is show. Also, the white chair and the two cars on the road are not visible.  The cropping showed a full picture of the ladies and gives a closer look of their beautiful smile. It shows the joy of a meemaw who normally does not take pictures excited to smile for the camera and share a picture with her granddaughter.

Like many before me, my search for a photo started by wading through collections of stock photos to find one that I believed could be a proper use of the cropping tool and one that tells a compelling story. I decided to get a bit personal with this submission by using it to highlight the highs and lows of being an individual who struggles with their mental health; specifically, an individual who struggles with a “Cluster B” personality disorder. I wanted to take an image that could tell two different stories and figured that by starting with the crop and then showing the full image it would lend itself better to the story that I was trying to tell.

From this image, we see that the man is distraught. He is overcome by negative emotions and is trying to collect himself. He is at the “low stage.”

But when the crop is removed, we see that the man is joined by a friend. One who is celebrating. Now we have the full picture and the full story: While one friend is celebrating a win, the other friend is distraught. Now how does this relate to mental health? For many of us, a team losing a game would not cause us to become this distraught, but what about what’s lurking beneath the surface? For those of us who suffer from “Cluster B” personality disorders, we are used to being told that we “make mountains out of molehills.” That our reactions to seemingly low-stakes situations aren’t normal, neglecting the fact that we often cannot control our reactions to these situations. That our “splitting” is a result of poorly managed distress and our attempts to self-soothe when faced with that distress.

As interesting as the trees and landscape are in photos there’s nothing like catching a glimpse of the local wildlife. I like to imagine the original photographer of this image had no intentions of capturing highland cattle in the wild but stumbled across them. Pleasantly surprised they took this photograph with the goal of capturing the entire scene with the cattle as their focus.

The original image features a couple of highland cows, the one in the background is not looking at the camera and instead focused on grooming itself. It’s very difficult to get wild animals to stay still for your photos little own pose for it.

For this reason, I have decided to crop him out of the photo and focus on the cow in the foreground. In the original image you can’t really see the emotion on the cattle’s face, cropping it allows a closer look upon the cattle exposing his emotion toward the camera man. He looks almost frightened but more so annoyed that his lunch has been interrupted.

I cropped this photo to focus on the emotion of the birthday girl. Surrounded by her friends, the scene has a happy silly tone, with the balloons, cake, and friends all with distinct personalities. When I zoomed in on her face I saw a different story. Mesmerized by the candles, she seems lost in thought and maybe a little sad. Gone is the energy from the small party around her. I wonder what she is thinking about.

My search for a photo started in the Flickr photo stream. After a bit of scrolling, I came across a wonderful photo of a steam engine. Being a person who appreciates the occasional locomotive, I wanted to find a picture of a train to crop. The profile this image was found on was chocked full of shots of planes, trains, and automobiles. After flicking through each image one by one, I was pleasantly surprised to find the above photo.

With a face reminiscent of the characters from the Thomas the Tank Engine franchise, she would be my muse. Although she has a wonderful engine with a robust carriage, the background was much too distracting and the focus should be on her. With a quick crop, I was able to reestablish her face as the focal point of the image.

With this new crop, we do now get to focus on her face. What is she thinking about? Where is she headed? What color is that eye shadow? With this close-up, we also encounter a greater set of details: the bolts around the face plate, the tube curving around the front of the train, and the chipping paint on the buffer. One may have not noticed those things if they were distracted by the rest of the train and the background.

The crop tool was used:

• To tell a different story
• To emphasize a focal point
• To simplify the background
• To un-center a subject
• To capture emotion