To Crop or Not to Crop?

Every post on Webmonkey gets an image, and more times than not, we need to crop those images.

I usually hate cropping photos. Back when I was working as a marketing designer, I'd have to crop and mangle beautiful photos to fit them onto a retail package or squeeze them into a banner ad. It sometimes made me sick to do so.

Today, I was talking with two of Wired.com's photo editors -- Jim and Keith -- about cropping photos. Specifically, what to call those bozos who leave box notes on your Flickr photos outlining what they deem to be the perfect crop, then saying in the note "it would be better if you cropped it like this". I hate that. Keith suggested we call them "crop cocks."

Personally, I defer to the maestro Henri Cartier-Bresson:

Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes a precise moment in time. We play with subjects that disappear; and when they're gone, it's impossible to bring them back to life. We can't alter our subject afterward... Writers can reflect before they put words on paper... As photographers, we don't have the luxury of this reflective time....We can't redo our shoot once we're back at the hotel. Our job consists of observing reality with help of our camera (which serves as a kind of sketchbook), of fixing reality in a moment, but not manipulating it, neither during the shoot nor in the darkroom later on. These types of manipulation are always noticed by anyone with a good eye. - Henri Cartier-Bresson - "American Photo", September/October 1997

So much about writing is pre-meditated, and I try my hardest to get away from that when I express myself creatively in other ways. That's one of the reasons why I love improvisational music, and why I try to approach photography and videography from the same POV as music -- off the cuff and from the hip is usually better than labored and sweated over.

Today's search also led me to this thread on the DPReview forums. It's filled with posts from both sides, and the most sensible folks say (paraphrasing here) yeah the "never crop" rule was true on film maybe, but now we have better software tools, and these thing should not be viewed as band-aids or crutches, but rather just TOOLS.

Anyway, how do you feel about it? How much do you think about it -- if at all -- when you're cropping a photo for inclusion in a design, or even when you're just posting to Flickr?

Photo: Electrospray/Flickr, CC