Sunday, March 14, 2010

Breaking some rules



When I first started shooting/retouching I remember having a conversation with my brother where he advised against "funky crops".

No, not like corn and wheat.

We were talking about unorthodox aspect ratios (crops) for the final pictures. The above picture is a cropped version of the original at a very unusual final resoluation of 1200x608. Why you ask did I crop it like that? 3 reasons:

1. There was too much white board on the bottom that needed to go
2. Using my traditional 2x3 ratio I would lose too much skin
3. I wanted to retain as much skin as possible

That's it. My considerations forced me to break the rules. But sometimes you learn the rules so you can break them :)

4 comments:

  1. The cropping on this really works, imho. Nicely done.

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  2. hey,
    this picture looks really nice.
    could you explain why you need the 2x3 ratio?
    and then could you also post before and after pictures?
    thanks :)

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  3. Hi agerONE sorry for the delay, it's been a while since I've looked at blogger comments. The 2x3 ratio is native to the 35mm format. It's just something out-of-the-box for us dSLR shooters :)

    Since writing this post, I've thought about my adherence to the out-of-the-box ratio and I've discovered that while it retains a lot of data and utilizes the most megapixels, it's not entirely necessary... medium format for example has all sorts of sizes from 6x6, 6x4.5, 6x7 and some even panoramic sizes (for film).

    I will in the upcoming days post some more information about my processes :)

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  4. hey, thanks for the answer, though :)
    I still think this image looks great with this aspect ratio because of the model's pose and because the camera was close to the model or zoomed in.
    This would work for a billboard, haha

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