Student Posts

This photo was taken during the riots that took place in France in December of 2022, where dozens of officers were wounded. What initially drew me into the original photo was the high contrast and focus surrounding the police officers. I didn’t see that there was anything technically “wrong” with the original, but I felt as though the emphasis surrounding the emotion of the police officers was lost in the photo as a whole. There are people standing off on either side of the road and motorcycles cluttering up the left side of the photo, so in my derivative, I wanted to bring more attention to the emotion shown on the officers faces. Using the rule of thirds, I kept the crop at eye level and created an intersection between the front two officers heads. This created a sense of movement up the street, keeping the intersection at eye level and bringing the photo over more to the left, and brought more focus to the expressions on the officers faces. In the derivative, the fear on the left officer’s face and the concentration on the right officer’s face are enhanced and the emotions are clearer. I then cropped out the group of people to the right of the road and the man standing to left behind the bikes bringing focus solely to the officers marching forward toward the chaos that they were about to face.

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)

I chose the Trees on Forest with Sun Rays by Sebastian Unrau because it looked like a very pretty forest but I felt like the photo could be elevated just a little to make it brighter. The shadowing in the photo made the outer areas quite dark and didn’t draw my attention quite as much as I thought it could before the crop. I think that the tree and focal area that the author was trying to draw our attention to was a little distracting with all the extra trees and darker shaded areas. I used the third method to crop the image and make the focal on the tree and the brightness of the sun’s reflection on the forest. Having those two areas of the focal point really draws your eyes to the brightness of the sun and the tree being the focal point in the forest. I love the way the cropped image makes me feel like this is an early morning when the sun has just reached the peak point in the sky. It is quite a stunning shot by Sebastian Unrau.

The original image is from a trip to Busch Gardens in Tampa, Florida. My friend and I decided to go to all the animal exhibits to check out all the different types there were around. This giraffe in particular caught my attention as I was taking pictures as it looked as though it had spotted me looking at it. However, unfortunately the area we were in was fairly crowded with tourists and the picture had to be taken behind someone else with their hand ending up in the frame.

Here in the Rule of Thirds cropped image, the giraffe becomes the main focus in frame while also emphasizing its glare towards the camera angle. Additionally, you are still able to note its size relative to its surroundings and shadows. Unfortunately, I was unable to adhere both to the Rule of Thirds while also cropping out the person’s hand and giving the viewer a more emphasized photo.

I wanted to find a photograph that was busy in composition, that contained interesting subject matter, and that would benefit from reducing some of the noise in the photo to create a more cohesive appearance. The photo that I chose is that of a group of friends standing around a dinning room table with an assortment of food and drinks scattered about. There are six people in the photograph, three of which appear to be engaged in conversation. The person on the left side, in the forefront, is looking back and to the left. There are two people on the right hand side right on the edge of the photograph. I get a sense that the room that they’re in is filled with various conversations, music, the clinking of utensils, wine glasses, among other things. I feel that it’s most likely a hectic space, while also being, carefree and inviting.

I initially set out to eliminate some of the unnecessary space around the figures in the center of the photograph. The two people on the right hand side were too close to the edge, which created tension in the picture. I felt that the light, the large, bright one on the top, was distracting to the rest of the image. The plates of food and wine bottles at the bottom of the image were also distracting, and the way that the wine bottles were arranged, they created a line the moved up through the middle of the photograph. I wanted to crop the photo in order to focus the attention of the space onto the conversation of the three people in the center of the photograph. I wanted to leave enough information of the person on the left hand side so that they are still visible, and that their position in the room is easily understood. The lady on the left hand side is now the focal point of the photograph. Due to the crop, the gaze of the other two ladies (middle and right) follows straight into the face of the lady on the left. There is enough detail kept in the photo that it retains the feel of a dinner party, while creating a much more intimate composition.

For this week’s challenge, I searched and searched and attempted to crop several Creative Commons images, but I was not satisfied with any of the ones I had found. After that search, I decided to take a look through my camera roll on my phone. As soon as I saw the photo below, I knew it would be perfect for this cropping challenge!

We hosted a reptile program at the library recently, and a coworker took this photo of me posing with an alligator display. As you can see, there is a lot going on in this photo. I would say that the main focal point is may head in the alligator’s mouth, but it has not be cropped particularly well. If you look closely though, there is another interesting subject in this photograph. In the background, another coworker of mine has a very enthusiastic reaction to my photo session with our visitor for the day. I thought that she would be the perfect subject for a new photo crop.

For the cropped photo, I really wanted to create an entirely new composition. I wanted my coworker’s smile to be the focus of the photograph so, I framed her so that her face was in the upper left third quadrant of the photo.

Since I am no longer visible in the photo, and you do not see what she is reacting to, this leaves it up to the viewer imagination. What makes it even more fun is if the viewer were only looking at this cropped image and saw the attribution, “is adapted from “Another Day at the Library,”” I think they would be extremely curious to know what was cropped out of this image. What would come to your mind if you only saw this photograph and the original title?

The image above to the left, although lovely, centers the horse in the image rather than positioning the subject on one of the intersection points from the Rule of Thirds, and has some distracting background elements, including two other horses just to the right of the subject. In order to get the photo to format nicely in WordPress, I chose to stick close to the original image’s 2:3 scaling.

My tighter crop, to the right, removes most of these background elements, and places the horse’s face closer to one of the intersections according to the Rule of Thirds. The subject’s resting left hind foot, generally a sign of comfort and unconcern, also falls near an intersection point, because I wanted to emphasize the calm mood of the image.