Behold the Scaleograph. In the days before electronic publishing, layout artists used this device to mark up photo prints for cropping and sizing. If it looks vaguely familiar, it may be because the crop tool icon in many photo editing programs is based on it:
(screenshot from Photoshop CS4)
Many times, people will take a photo that has a distraction in it, and then say, “Oh, I’ll just crop that out.” I say, if it’s distracting and can be cropped out later, why photograph it now?
In high school, college, and during my days as a Navy Journalist and Photojournalist, I was taught to “crop in the camera.” That is to say, I did my best to fill the frame with the point(s) of interest, so that a lot of cropping or other post-processing wasn’t necessary. Back then, post-processing was either done in a wet darkroom or left up to a trusted photofinisher – a difficult, time-consuming, and tedious process, involving devices like that thing at the top of the entry.
It’s much simpler to crop photos today than it was 20 years ago, certainly, but something that isn’t considered is whether it should be done more often, simply because it’s easier. It seems much better to me to take the photo you want to take in the first place than to spend time afterward making a poor photo into the one you want.
This isn’t to say you should never edit your images. That’s ridiculous. Often, a little work in your image editor will make a good image great. One of my favorite shots ever (above) is cropped square, a shape you could never crop in your camera. My point is that you shouldn’t depend on Photoshop, or GIMP, or whatever you use to edit your images, in order to fix something you shouldn’t have done in the first place. Because, given a choice between making photos or Photoshopping them, I’ll take the camera any day.
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