Uncropped
I post-holed toward the garage in pursuit of more black sunflower seeds to fill my empty bird feeder. I turned and saw the Andrew Wyeth . (Btw, what do you think of this crop, dissenter?) I ran back to get my camera, certain the sun would set in seconds, not hours, and snapped away. But I couldn’t translate what I saw onto the screen, and I couldn’t crop it to my satisfaction. The storm window interrupts the white wood frame. The final version is not perfect, but I agree with rakkity, there is a lot to look at, and I do like the way the small image bleeds into the dark grey background.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with my brother, Brian, on Friday. I was praising Dakota’s eye when he said, “I’ve never set up a photograph. I shoot away and wait to see what develops.†I replied, “I’ve never gotten what I’ve set out to shoot. It I plan a shot, it’s always a disappointment.â€
The flip side of that is I get all kinds of surprises. Yesterday’s comments, for instance.
Here’s yesterday’s version, Jennifer. It was posted for maybe five minutes.
Much more to my taste (like, so what?), though I’ll send you a sidebar direct attempt of my own, now that you’ve posted the whole shebang with which to work. It’s a tricky business, I’ll grant. Not for any of the “I never crop an image” silliness. The act of shooting is the first crop, after all. And sometimes when I know I “see” something but am unsure where to “crop”, I shoot a little too wide to give me latitude later (though that means any closeup thereby derived is degraded over an originally closeup shot).
Whatever the preferences involved, good eye. Good light, great composition, and mostly, good heart to go after what you saw.
Comment by demi-assenter — February 1, 2005 @ 8:08 am
Good cropping is the key to good pictures. Last Saturday, Beth & I had a look at about 50 8×10 pictures submitted by readers to Adventure magazine; many were interesting, but few were striking, and nearly all needed cropping.
All around us were professional pictures (we were at a travel show at the DC Convention center), and every one of them was either well cropped or well composed in the original.
I’m looking now at both of your pictures, and there is no doubt in my mind at all that the tightly cropped one is far, far superior.
Comment by rakkity — February 1, 2005 @ 10:21 am
I waffle between telling a story and posting a photo that will grab the viewer. I really wanted to dispaly the expanded view with my foot prints, the snow covered wood pile and the deep blue sky, but it bored me.
Any word from your peripatic daughter? Hey, maybe she’d like to write for the blog? Did you send her off with a digital camera?
Comment by michael — February 1, 2005 @ 12:05 pm
Katie hurried off to Spain the Sunday before last, amidst the roaring gales in Newark. (That was a story worthy of the blog, I kid you not.) She carried her Christmas electronic mini-cadcam, and tells us she has taken dozens, if not hundreds, of photos (with some movie clips and sounds, maybe?) in Madrid and Todedo (which she loved). Sometime last week she transferred her photos to a CD, and then her camera broke. (Or maybe it was the reverse.)
But as of now in Sevilla, she hasn’t found an internet cafe that would take a CD or that had a USB port to email us any pictures. Next week, at a University computer lab, maybe she’ll find a way to upload some pictures to her website. ( http://katie.schmahl.org )
To get her back on track taking pix, yesterday I shipped off my old tiny electronic camera to her. Then today I got an email from her saying she had gotten *both* of her cameras fixed. (Both? Huh? Something she skipped in her e-missives?)
So Katie’s now with her Spanish familia, the Luques, and is busy getting ready for school Hikes down 6 floors from her apt, then 30 minutes to El Universidad, she says.
Must be some great stories here, but the keyboard is a web chokepoint, and there may be some interesting pictures, but we’re still waiting for illumination. If any good ones come down the wires, we’ll fire them off to the blog for editorial review by master M.
Comment by rakkity — February 1, 2005 @ 2:30 pm
I think the one you put up for maybe 5 minutes yesterday (that I didn’t see until today, that I can’t see large) is stupid. (I don’t actually like the Wyeth, either.) I like the one with footprints ok, but it’s not exciting. But I should have come clean about the extra work (besides teaching 6th grade general science) I’m doing this year: further developing (and teaching) a unit which I call “Sun and Shadows”. I say this because I notice that’s what I keep being drawn to in everyone’s photographs. Oh, maybe “Sun, Shadows, and Reflections”. So, you might take my excitement about this and Adobe Shadows in that light. (I’m still feeling stupid that I didn’t know how I knew that the Adobe Shadows weren’t cast by direct light, and that I couldn’t come up with the source.)
I’m enjoying these lessons in cropping. I’ve never seriously tried cropping anything I’ve taken.
Comment by Jennifer — February 1, 2005 @ 8:23 pm
Oops! you can get rid of that, right, Michael? And I can’t, right?
Comment by Jennifer — February 1, 2005 @ 8:24 pm
I’d be happy to simply link to http://katie.schmahl.org when text and photos appear…no, I guess not, I’d really rather post it here, but I can deal.
Stupid? Unexciting? You don’t like the Wyeth? Okay, Jennifer, you have passed the all-important non-boring blog test. It’s time for you to contribute. How about a short story like, “I Sent My Daughter Off to a War Zone and Slept Like a Log?” or ìThe Cure For Cancer: How My Daughter Met My Minimum Expectations.î
Comment by michael — February 2, 2005 @ 7:22 am
Katie has already posted some pictures at community.webshots.com, but I can’t seem to get access to them. There are some pictures there by schmahl211, but they sure aren’t Katie’s.
Hope to get this straightened out soon.
Comment by rakkity — February 2, 2005 @ 10:25 am
Re: “I sent my daughter off to a war zone … ”
So, writers for the blog need to exaggerate situations nearly unrecognizably?
Re: “… minimum expectations … ” If my EXPECTATIONS for my daughter going on vacation included that bad things would happen … well, I wouldn’t have allowed her to go. OK, so, no one else in the world would use the phrase that way.
PS I only noticed and said I didn’t like the photograph because I liked the other one SO MUCH.
Comment by jennifer — February 2, 2005 @ 6:47 pm