What's (in) the Picture?

Stepping Out

By Chris Breebaart on 11/05/2020

 

 

We have a family of great tits as guests in our backyard. The parents fly in and out to feed the unseen – but quite vocally present – brethren. The theme for the weekly Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #96 is ‘cropping the shot’. Show how and why you crop shots, that is the basic question.

Basically I am not an avid cropper. Certainly in the days of film, cropping let always to the loss of quality. In digital times that is somehow different, especially using RAW format and a much better image capture technology. But in general: when taking the photo I try to frame it the way I want the final result to look like. Sometimes (digital is cheap) I take different frames of the same subject. But sometimes that is not possible.

In this photo the nest is on the back of our shed, and I can sit about 10 meters away, more or less hidden. Even using a long lens (300 mm on a not full frame sensor so approximately 450 mm) I can not get ‘close enough’. Because they are quite tiny, a distant shot is not that interesting to look at. Then cropping is a logical step to come up with a presentable result.

Yesterday I published ‘In Coming‘ that shows how one of the parents approaches the nest. Today a take off from the nest. It is relatively easy to record the departure from the nest: when you see the head, start using the burst and all chances are that you have one nice shot in flight.  To show you the amount of crop I added the original frame below.

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Shot with Nikon D500, edited using Snapseed and Marksta. Click the picture for a bigger version