Jane Barrager

I was looking for an image that I felt conveyed everyday life. I started looking for “hide and seek” themed pictures and stumbled across this one. I couldn’t really figure out why this was called hide and seek, outside of the fact that the person’s face was hidden by their hood, but I like the phone being the focal point of her place in the photo. At face value, I see a person who is selling food at a local market, with shipping supplies or storage boxes for her wares. Now with some tweaking…

Voila! The image tells a different story. I called it “Distraction” because this perspective changes the story the image may convey to the viewer. For example, I now see someone surrounded by squalor but seeks respite from their situation via their phone, or their “distraction”. You could also see something less depressing, like someone cleaning out a storage unit and taking a break while their lunch cools off. Either way, cropping can be a powerful tool!

Before

After

For me, selecting an image to crop was the hardest. I am a photographer by trade and when I take my photos, I take into account major cropping or rule of thirds into my photography in the camera. I wanted to use my own images, but most of them had already been cropped the way I like them to be, so I grabbed one of my photos from the trash. This was taken in Bar Harbor, Maine last summer. We were as this little cove, parked on the side of the road, literally. I wanted to get out and walk between the rocks when these two gulls decided to join us.

I cropped the bridge and the other bird out to change the story a little bit. Even though gulls can be social animals, I wanted to show off the markings on this particular gull. The bridge was distracting an didn’t make the place seem as magical as it could be.

There is an old saying that says that a picture is worth a thousand words. I took that saying and firmly implanted it in my head. At any given time, there are so many things happening. In the photo below, we see a photo (presumably) of a man standing next to his rickshaw bicycle with motorbikes in front of him. The image is full of life and stories, way more than a thousand. There is so much going on. But what I chose to focus on is the underwear advertisement in the upper right hand corner.

Where is the underwear advertisement? With a quick snip and a focus on the undergarments dangling from a tree branch among the power lines, we end up with a completely different story that we were initially given.

If you crop an image from an image, does it still have a thousand words? In this case, I’d say yes. By cropping the underwear and using grid-lines (on Pixlr.com) to put it in the upper third of the image, we are given millions of possible stories about the underwear, as opposed to the story of the man.

This picture shows that the photographer is driving in the car with the sunset behind them. It tells the audience that they are driving away from the sunset but still found it worthy to take a picture. Taking the picture in the mirror of the car frames the sunset in an interesting way.

I cropped the picture this way because it tells a completely different story than the original. With this crop, the audience doesn’t have any context as to who took the picture, allowing for more interpretation. I also think it puts the focal point more on the actual sunset and less on the mirror of the car while still being able to tell that the photographer is close to the road.