Who knew a crop could make such a difference to a photograph?

There are two reasons to crop an image. There’s a practical reason – to make the photo fit a specific print size, screen size or image placeholder on a website. But there’s also creative cropping, which you use to make an image work better. I don’t often use creative cropping because it ties you down in the way you can display it. This example, however, has changed my mind.

The original shot was taken in the native 3:2 aspect ratio of my Sony A7 III. The main interest is in the landscape, but there is, unavoidably, a lot of sky in the frame. It’s an OK sky, but most of the interest is just above the horizon.

Now normally I’d leave this as it is because of practical considerations – I don’t really know what crop I might need in the future. But I thought I’d try it cropped to the legendary Hasselblad X-Pan ratio of 65:24. This is a much wider ratio even than 16:9, but it’s easy enough to do in Lightroom with a custom crop ratio – you just type these numbers into the fields.

The difference was startling. Normally, I feel a crop is a crop is a crop, but this time the image was transformed. I added in a vignette, partly for the composition and partly because the X-PAN does tend to introduce a little corner darkening, which is part of the look.

So I don’t really know where and how I can use a 65:24 ratio image, but one possibility is on a website with a gallery feature that can display images at their full size with no background (or a faded background). And honestly, if you do have a portfolio website it’s definitely worth doing, or at least finding out if it’s possible.

I’m saying this because this image has convinced my that creative cropping can, sometimes, make such a huge difference that you have to do it anyway, regardless of any practicalities later.

Besides, if you’re working in Lightroom, as I was here, you can always change your mind later!