What things should one take into account when looking at cropping a photo?

Question

When looking at cropping a photo:

• How do you decide whether to crop it or not (for starters)?
• What things should you take into account - both practical and artistic?

I guess that this question is really about composition 'after the fact'.

Here's a 'sample' photo which you can base your answers on, but my question isn't specifically about this particular photo.

Answer

When cropping a photo, I try to do/achieve several things:

• Center:

  1. the subject, when it is slightly more on one side. Of course, in some photos, putting the subject in the corner is done to achieve an artistic effect, but I'm not talking about those cases.

  2. the scene, for example when the horizon is too low or too high.

• Remove:

  1. the elements which attract attention away from the subject of an image. For example, if it is an image of a person in a street, and there are no other people except someone not very nice to see in the corner, it's better to crop the image.

  2. the unwanted elements. For example, if there is a tree outside of the picture, but you see a part of this tree in a corner, there is a good reason to crop the image.

  3. the elements that show that the photo is not straight. For example, a tall building on a side of the photo can attract attention by the fact that it "falls" to the center of an image, due to perspective problems. Another example is anything straight in real life, which is shown as a curve on a photo, due to the lens distortion.

  4. the empty areas, except when those areas add an artistic value. A block of brick wall is an empty area in this case.

To resume, I crop photos when either there are elements which must not be here or when there is nothing interesting on the sides of the image.

In the sample photo, it's difficult to tell what was your purpose. If the subject is a young girl watching through a window, I'll probably crop everything except the girl's head, thus keeping a small margin around to show the snow outside and the black frame of the window.

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