Dear all,

We often get caught up, thinking within the frame that is given to us. Whether shooting full frame or with a crop sensor, whether cropping a picture or not, we often tend to stick to the rectangular shape we know of the good old photo prints and the proportions we know from standard television and computer screens. Yet think about it, checking out wildlife books, websites and magazines, you’ll find plenty of pictures cropped to completely different rectangular proportions.

It’s the search for header pictures to this site that made me think about this. The website theme only taking on 288×1000 pixel images made me look differently at my images. And suddenly, some images that had up to then not been very useful to me came to life. A lesson to take along: next time I’ll be going out there, I’ll be having my header eyes open as well.

A good example can be found in the image of the Hyena at the shores of Lake Nakuru NP in Kenya. The raw image looked like this.

Not bad, yet a lot of distracting empty space, in front and especially in the background.

A thight crop of the same image makes for a much more compelling image, less distraction, with a lot of space for the Hyena to look into and almost making you wanting to see what he saw.

That’s it for now,

Guy