I’m not a fan of cropping.
In general, I object to cropping, especially when executed by someone other than the photographer.
I accept that in the realm of publishing it is a necessary evil, and that with the internet, Facebook and other imaging venues embrace cropping without consequence of how it affects photographs.
Yet, occasionally I find necessary to crop one of my photos.
Last I month I made an image of an Italian ETR 610 Pendolino from the south-end of the station platform at Arth-Goldau, Switzerland. While focused on the impressive looking train, I inadvertently included a portion of a mast on the platform that appears as an out of focus blob at the left of the image.
While I often like to work with selective focus, in my opinion this accident in no way enhanced the photo. Furthermore once playing with the cropping feature in Lightroom, I found that cropping other elements of the line side infrastructure materially improved my photo.
Below are some examples. What do you think?
Sometimes you can only get the image you imagined with a crop, as you don’t have a zoom or can’t get in position. I’m not so keen on post-processing in general, but think that cropping is often necessary to get it just right. And yes, your final crop is far better!
The final version is a very pleasing image without the distracting elements. Train, mountains and we can still see what the catenary structure looks like.