Arthur H. Bleich
Contributing Editor
Digital Camera Magazine
Years ago, when I was leaving for a teaching assignment in Ethiopia, I had to attend a special orientation class in Washington that included "up close and personal" training. To most of us at the session, it seemed if we moved any closer to each other, we’d find ourselves in an embrace.
Every serious photographer knows of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the great French photojournalist, who made sure to frame his images in the camera’s viewfinder so precisely, they rarely required any cropping. Unfortunately, most of us take pictures from much too far away and later try to compensate by having just a piece of the image enlarged. This sometimes works out reasonably well if you are using film, but it can be deadly if you’re shooting with a digital camera.
Why? Because every time you throw part of your image away by cropping, you’re reducing your camera’s effective resolution. In short, you’re only getting part of the resolution you’ve paid for and throwing the rest of those valuable pixels away.
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Let’s say you shoot a picture of some kids with a digicam having 1280 x 1024 resolution. It’s easy to get carried away in the spirit of the moment and just grab a shot of them sitting on the front steps of their house, eating ice cream and having a good time. You check the picture in the LCD monitor on playback and it seems to look fine. But when you bring it up in your imaging program, you suddenly realize there’s too much headroom and a bit too much on either side of the kids. No problem, you think, I’ll just crop that space out. And when you do, the shot suddenly looks terrific...no distracting elements around the kids, your eye goes right to their smiles, hey, you’ve got a Kodak Moment.
Unfortunately, when you go to print it out on your ink-jet at 8x10, it doesn’t quite make it. Some jagged edges have begun to show and it isn’t as sharp as you’d like it to be. Well, you’d have the same problem if you’d cropped a film image- it would get grainier, but by now, we’re all used to seeing picture grain and it doesn’t bother us as much as it did our "purist" grandfathers. Pixels we’re not used to, and find disconcerting...and probably always will because they look more unnatural than grain.
What you’ve really done by cropping your high resolution image is reduce it to a lower resolution, perhaps to 1024 x 768, or even 640 x 480. In essence, the more pixels you get rid of through cropping, the lower the final resolution of your picture will be, and the less likely you’ll be able to get a decent-sized print.
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So you might want to try this easy fix until you develop your eye to the point where you can frame your image precisely in the viewfinder or LCD monitor. After you’ve composed your picture, take a giant step (or more) forward and then shoot. You’ll be amazed at the improvement in your pictures, especially those of people. When you photograph houses or landmarks, you may have to take more than a couple of steps. Do it!
Try this practical exercise. Find a willing son or daughter, neice or nephew, or neighborhood kid who’ll stand still for a few minutes. Shoot a picture from the waist up. Then move in for the next shot. Finally, take a third picture you feel is almost too close. Now make prints of those shots, full frame, without any cropping. Which do you like the best? I’ll bet it won’t be the first photo.
Here’s something else to consider. The optical viewfinders of many cameras (both film and digital) rarely give you the real boundaries of the images you’ll end up with. To compound the problem, they usually show less of the image than is actually being photographed. So while you may think you’ve composed tightly and are in close enough, you usually end up with a lot more than you saw, requiring you to lop off valuable pixels to match the image you had in mind when you shot.
The LCD monitor, on the other hand, is a more accurate indicator of what you’ll really get. If you use the optical viewfinder to frame a shot, make sure you know what its limits are so that you can compensate by moving in an appropriate amount. To accomplish this, set the camera on a tripod or other stable (and non-movable) surface. Then compare what you see in the optical viewfinder with the image on the LCD monitor. If you have a zoom lens, try it at several settings because the difference may not be consistent throughout the entire zoom range.
While we’re on the topic of zoom lenses, cameras with digital (as opposed to optical) zooms lose resolution when they zoom in, much the same as if you’d cropped out pixels in your imaging program. While pixels in the center of the sensor keep working to record the image, the ones at the edges get a coffee break. Optical zoom lenses, on the other hand, keep every pixel on the job when they zoom, assuring that the high resolution you paid for will be delivered.
Learning to precisely frame your images when you take them isn’t easy. I guess most of us have a built-in safety mechanism that makes us want to shoot more than we need because we know we can make less from more but not more from less. You’ll have to diligently work to overcome the tendency to keep your distance, but once you get used to moving in, the dynamite images you capture at higher resolution will be well worth it.
© Arthur H. Bleich 1999, All rights reserved.
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