[Leica] Just for fun, now cropping.

[mark at rabinergroup.com (Mark Rabiner)]

I can tell you the reason.

Photographers who had fine art aspirations of any kind and that means
commercial photographers and photojournalists filed out their negative
carriers and printed full frame black borders in the 60's through 90's.
A black border around your image makes the image appear to be not sitting on
the surface of the paper boringly but exist wonderfully a half inch under.
It added amazing depth.
Regardless it added a lot to the look of a print;
To the extent that if in a stack of prints you have one cropped print; that
is a print with no black borders people will draw attention to what an
abomination it is just about every single time. You cant slip it by people.
"great stack of prints Mark except for the shot of the apple!"
The apple shot was the one without the border.

So its easy enough to say it's "part of your vision" and that was part of
the whole Magnum thing. The holiness of what you thought you saw through
your viewfinder at the moment your shutter accidentally went off.
But it was all and still is pure baloney.
None of it would have happened without the black borders.

Now that with digital you can put a black border around any image you crop
there is less hushed talk about the wonderfulness of never cropping your
images. People crop the hell out of everything before they let anybody see
it.

Working for papers one of the first things I learned over the decades you
can have the borders be as thick as you want they're just going to take the
face out anyway. And looking back at those tear sheets and my contact sheets
and my prints I'd given them that they cropped to the extreme the image in
the paper was always an improvement over what I'd given them.
It's part of the "if its not good enough get closer" thing.
Fill it with a face.


Mark William Rabiner



> From: Nathan Wajsman <photo at frozenlight.eu>
> Reply-To: Leica Users Group <lug at leica-users.org>
> Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2009 07:08:59 +0200
> To: Leica Users Group <lug at leica-users.org>
> Subject: Re: [Leica] Just for fun, now cropping.
> 
>> 
>> Maybe someone could explain this, thereby explaining why some make a
>> fetish out of not doing a crop later...
>> 
>> :-)
>> 
>> 
>> Steve
>>