Compositional Mind Games
There are times when I really struggle with composition when I’m cropping an image. To a degree, composition is a matter of taste and personal preference, though most folks would agree on a few major principles. Some of those might be: avoid clipping body parts or cropping too tight on the subject the subject usually (though not always) should not be centered in the frame leave plenty of room in the frame in the direction the subject is facing, looking or flying (in the case of birds) Where I sometimes run into difficulty making a composition decision is when there are other compositional elements in the image that I might like to include in the final version of the photo. Thanks largely to the influence of Richard Ditch, I’ve become fond of strong graphic lines in some of my images, as long as those lines come from natural or rustic elements (power poles or wires just won’t cut it with me). This summer I photographed a juvenile Red-tailed Hawk on an old, rustic pole fence in Beaverhead County, Montana and I’m having a very difficult time making cropping decisions on some of those images. My natural tendency is to crop fairly tightly on the bird to get good detail on the subject but I also like the graphic lines provided by the fence with different cropping choices. Several times I’ve thought I’d finally figured out which version I prefer, but when I came back to the computer a few hours later and looked at them one more time I was again undecided. Compositional mind…