Jim's Gift

When I discussed cropping and composition with Jim, I shared my frustration about the lack of a method to create successful compositions. I guess what I was trying to express was that we had just seen evidence that that inside of each frame, there is a better, smaller picture that is trying to come out (see the previous post in this series). I will need to go back to this later.

He seemed to think for a moment, then, "from the recesses of his mind" he asked if I had a cropping frame. Then he went upstairs and came down with an actual cropping frame in hand:

There are two sheets of cardboard that slide past each other. Each sheet has a clever trapezoidal opening, so that when you pull the slide in one direction, you get rectangles in 8x10 aspect ratio, and in the other, in 5x7 aspect ratio. The opening can be made of any size, up to the maximum allowed by the size of the frame. It is really a clever tool.

Jim not only is a genius and a sexy man, he is also very generous and he gave me the tool!

Yesterday and today I sat down with a few contact sheets and tried it out. It definitely helps visualizing the effects of a crop.  I think I will need to figure out a routine to make the most of it. Maybe a good approach is to set the frame to about 1/4 of the print on which you are using it, then move it over the picture to survey the possibilities. Look what is in each of the four corners, and what is in the center. I will have to try this a few times to see if it works.

A side note: there are many articles about cropping on the internet. All of them describe how to crop using software tools (Photoshop, obviously, is a favorite). Very litte refers to the discipline of doing good crops. One would imagine that easy-to-use software would have freed us from having to worry about the tools, so that we could focus on the creative aspects... but we seem to focus on writing about the tools instead!