Seeing Your Photograph

It is one thing to see your photograph before you take it, but it is entirely another thing to “see” your photograph after you have taken it and are looking at the final print.

After you take the photograph, the finished print will probably not be exactly what you saw in the viewfinder. This is ok, if you are merely filing the print away in a box or put it in a family album, or post it on line.

But if you are going to have an enlargement made for matting, framing and hanging it on a wall, then you will want the best print possible. I am talking about visually, not printing quality.

The most enjoyable session I have when teaching creative photography classes is cropping your photograph the way you want it to appear.

In the Photo of the Week of this update I have shown a street musician in New Orleans. I am going to show you here the original photograph and then how it was cropped. Here is the original photograph:

Here is the cropped version…maybe I should have just cropped off the top and left the hands, part of the drum and more of the duffle bag in…just a thought.

Ok, same scene, different shot, original:

Here is my cropped version