I am by no means a fantastic photographer, so the photography advice I give on my blog is few and far between (and is usually advice I got from someone with actual photography experience). I’ve been playing around with the macro feature on my camera lately, which results in really up-close-and-personal shots of the subject — in my case, things in my garden!
The details in the photos are impressive, but the compositions aren’t always great. So I started playing around with cropping and I’m loving the results I’ve gotten.
You can crop a photo in pretty much any program… Paint, Word, Photoshop, etc. You can even crop photos on WordPress and Facebook!
When you crop a photo, you are selecting an area of a photo you would like to keep and then removing all of the rest (Yes, I know that most people know what this is… but just in case!). I’ve found that for detail shots, cropping is my friend big time.
My photos go from this:
To this:
If you have a very detailed photo, cropping the photo in just the right manner can enhance the detail even more. I think it adds a lot of texture to my nature shots that would have otherwise been lost.
Wouldn’t these shots look great as a gallery of square, matted frames?
These tight shots could be taken on a really nice camera, but my point and shoot camera isn’t all that sophisticated. For now, cropping and the macro feature will do just fine!
A Smith of All Trades 