Cropping

[bruce282]

What percent of your 'keeper' pictures end up being cropped?

As my sig shows I've got a bunch of prime lenses, so I have zoom with my feet. Right now I'm playing around in field sports, bike racing, and street shooting. With bike racing I can scout out locations before the event and pick my lens, not so much with peewee football or soccer. So I feel like I have enough megapixels on either camera to to use say my 180MM with the idea of cropping it to what I want.

Bruce

 

[clanthar]

90+%

Joe

 

[ann]

maybe 2% i Try to cropped in camera. Old training is hard to give up!

 

[analog.universe]

I would say 90% for me also, because I'm a little composition crazy. The amount cropped is probably significant however... 90% of my 90% probably lose less than 10% of their pixels.

 

[KmH]

When it came to action sports I quickly got very tired of having to crop a buttload of images (1000-1400 images a week).

So I got lenses that had sufficient 'reach' so I wouldn't have to crop so many. For field sports I shot from the end lines or the corners and used a 150-500 mm, and later a 200-400 mm zoom.

 

[dots]

Unsure of the % but crop for printing, often as not.

 

[480sparky39 38]

99.9% of mine are cropped. I always over-shoot the scene and give myself a liberal amount of cushion on all 4 sides.

 

[MLeeK]

Nearly everything in print ends up cropped to some degree. Your sensors not the same size as a standard print, so... it's all cropped some. As for zooming in and cropping? maybe 15%? I use a 70-200 to shoot the football and stuff and I am OFTEN at 200mm when they are on the other side of the field. Those are the ones I am cropping most.
Your 180 should be stunning cropped and even printed rather large. I RARELY get an order for anything larger than an 8x10 from sports and usually that's an album. For posters I point the client at the best images and explain why. I am pretty confident I COULD make a poster out of an image from across the field, but I don't THINK I have yet... I'd have to really look back and see!

 

[ann]

I do all of my own printing, which allows me to avoid the cropping issue with prints.

 

[DiskoJoe]

When I do weddings I crop a lot of stuff because you cant always get to a good spot.

 

[fotoshooter]

Having started in photography before digital I learned to crop in camera which is still my preferred mode.. Cropping outside of the camera will render a smaller image which will not enlarge to the high quality of the full size image cropped in camera.

We see a lot of this at work whenever customers provide a self cropped image file for printing.. After cropping it down to a small image they want 20x30 enlargements but are then unhappy with the poor quality..

 

[480sparky39 38]

Having started in photography before digital I learned to crop in camera which is still my preferred mode.. Cropping outside of the camera will render a smaller image which will not enlarge to the high quality of the full size image cropped in camera.

We see a lot of this at work whenever customers provide a self cropped image file for printing.. After cropping it down to a small image they want 20x30 enlargements but are then unhappy with the poor quality..

Well, sure, if you shot the image at, say, 4000 x 3000 pixels and cropped it down to 900 x 600. But if you 'shot it a bit wide' so you could crop it at different aspect ratios depending on the size of print, then you would only need crop it down to just 4000 x 2666 for a 20x30. At that point, you're not losing much.

 

[fotoshooter]

Having started in photography before digital I learned to crop in camera which is still my preferred mode.. Cropping outside of the camera will render a smaller image which will not enlarge to the high quality of the full size image cropped in camera.

We see a lot of this at work whenever customers provide a self cropped image file for printing.. After cropping it down to a small image they want 20x30 enlargements but are then unhappy with the poor quality..

Well, sure, if you shot the image at, say, 4000 x 3000 pixels and cropped it down to 900 x 600. But if you 'shot it a bit wide' so you could crop it at different aspect ratios depending on the size of print, then you would only need crop it down to just 4000 x 2666 for a 20x30. At that point, you're not losing much.

I agree..

Being in the photo business I see a lot of self cropped files that we cannot do much beyond 4x6 or 5x7.

Those with experience know to crop as little as possible but many inexperienced do too much cropping..