Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/09/15
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Regarding: http://www2.2alpha.com/~pklein/tofino/3-37MomBabySunset.jpg http://www2.2alpha.com/~pklein/tofino/3-37MomBabySunsetCrop2.jpg Afterswift/Bob Rosen wrote: >Don't overdo it. You have an excellent portrait. Yep, that family would have >paid you good money for that shot. Bob, the exercise has been useful, even if it got excessive. In this case, I think I could have gotten closer, and if I'd had more film, I would have. I do sometimes have the problem of not seeing everything in the frame and not cropping enough in camera. Part of it is because when I'm wearing my glasses, I can only see about 3/4 of a 35mm lens frame, and even though I can see the whole 50mm frame, the edges don't seem as important. This is less of a problem when I wear contact lenses, but I don't like to wear them when I'm doing a lot of driving or outdoor activities where I can't easily deal with any contact lens problems. Perhaps with my next disposable $2500 (hah!), I should get a .58x body. But I'm an available light hound, so I feel more secure focusing a .72x. How-evah, this whole exchange brings up something that often bothers me. There is an unwritten credo that a lot of photographers worship--the idea that you have must cut every element until the picture is of nothing but the subject, devoid of context. And then they say, great, strong picture, you really got close, etc. The problem is that often, if you get too close, you affect what you're photographing. And if you cut all context, or reduce it to an ambiguous fragment, the picture can lose meaning. If you take a picture of just a woman crying, you have no idea *why* she's crying. If you take a picture of a woman crying in the rubble of a collapsed building, you have a story. But give a picture editor the choice of both pictures, and he'll take the close-up every time. And he'll put in a caption explaining that she is grieving because her boyfriend is in that collapsed building that we don't even see. Me, I'd probably take the close shot, if I felt I could do it without intruding unduly. But I'd also back off, and make sure that there was some rubble in another picture. Just a few bricks and a bit of dust will do. The part standing for the whole. Mike Johnston wrote what I thought was a very good column about this very subject a while back: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/columns/sm-02-10-27.shtml - --Peter Klein Seattle, WA - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html