Fill the Frame or Shoot Wide?

[Brenda]

Good afternoon - my name is Brenda and I've been lurking almost since the very beginning of this fine forum and just recently joined. I appreciate all the great advice and information I've gathered from all the talent here.

My question relates to "filling the frame" vs. "shooting wide." I've been reading Bryan Peterson's books, specifically "Understanding Digital Photography" and he states over and over how important it is to get it right in the camera and to fill the frame, but if you do that and you want to print, aren't you going to lose parts of your picture, whereas if you shoot wide, you can crop and have more control over what will be cropped out of the picture, or am I totally missing it?

Thanks for any help you can offer.

[Boomer]

I think there are advantages to shooting both ways, depending on the subject matter. The longer I try to improve myself, the more I try to 'get it right' in camera. However, with landscapes sometimes a crop is necessary to improve the impact of a scene. I think the most important thing is not to have too much dead space in ANY shot, that'll kill an image for sure.

[jeffkohn]

I think you should carefully compose when shooting, but leave yourself a little breathing room for cropping if you think you might need to print at something other than a 3:2 ratio. For landscape/nature stuff I find this to be less of an issue because I'll usually print at the native ratio. But for portrait work in particular you need to be thinking about cropping room, because most likely the images are going to end up as 5x7 or 8x10/4:5 prints. If you fill the frame perfectly at 3:2 and then try to print at 8x10 you're going to have some real problems.

[CaptainTom]

This seems like a simple yes or no question. But, the answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no.
If I am shooting for a client (commercial shots for advertising, poster, etc.) I need to know what the final product placement will be. Quite often though, the client just takes the shot and places it to their needs. In both cases I will shoot very wide and let the client crop for their placement.
When I am shooting for myself, I know that the final product will more than likely be either 8x10, 11X14, or more likely a 16x20. So, I can now shoot closer and visualize the crop.
there are focusing screens available for most cameras that will have lines etched in them at the various print ratios.
if you can learn the various ratios and visualize them while composing your shots, you will be another step closer to master photographer status.

[Brenda]

Thank you! This helps a lot. I was a little surprised at Bryan's advice since I know he shoots and sells stock photos and I assumed some of his prints would need to be cropped, but perhaps he's trying to instill proper shooting techniques first.

[bbailey]

Yeah, I think he is trying to get you to avoid shooting everything wide and then cropping it to "rescue" the image later. If you know/think you are going to be outputting to a different aspect ratio, you should give yourself the appropriate breathing room when framing the shot in camera.

[RobyMD]

How wide do you mean when you say wide? Are you talking about just a little room around the subject or a lot of room. Maybe I'm misinterpret what you mean by wide but it seems for image quality reasons you wouldn't want to shoot to wide and what about the compression you'd get of a scene at one focal length verse another?

[josphy]

Filling the frame obviously maximizes the quality because every bit you crop loses some of your negative (or pixels). If in doubt, you can usually shoot two versions of a photo in most situations. Unless the photo is a snapshot, you can take the time to shoot a version suitable for printing full-frame and also one that is a little wider to allow for cropping or suitable for printing at 4:5 ratios (8x10, 16x20, etc.) so you don't lose any important elements of the scene. I think a lot of photographers that do stock photography will also take the time to shoot horizontal and vertical versions of a composition because one might be more useful than the other to a potential client depending on the layout of their ad or whatever they are using hte photo for.

[johnastovall]

Originally Posted by josphy

Filling the frame obviously maximizes the quality because every bit you crop loses some of your negative (or pixels). If in doubt, you can usually shoot two versions of a photo in most situations. Unless the photo is a snapshot, you can take the time to shoot a version suitable for printing full-frame and also one that is a little wider to allow for cropping or suitable for printing at 4:5 ratios (8x10, 16x20, etc.) so you don't lose any important elements of the scene. I think a lot of photographers that do stock photography will also take the time to shoot horizontal and vertical versions of a composition because one might be more useful than the other to a potential client depending on the layout of their ad or whatever they are using hte photo for.

An aid to in frame cropping can be a focusing screen with crop lines on it.

http://www.brightscreen.com/croplines.html

http://www.katzeyeoptics.com/page--C...gridlines.html