Cropping question

[crazyfly1]

Hi Folks, I have been away for a while, it's good to be back.
Here is a cropping question for you all. I am curious to know what you all would do with this photo. I did all of this in lightroom beta 4. I used the crop overlay that has the curlyque thing (not sure what thats called or if it has a name) I put the curl over the squirls eye. Let me know what you would do and what you think of mine.
BTW sorry I had to totally kill the quality of a 5 meg file, took it down to 14% quality to post.

[TommyO]

Well, you have been gone a while. Hope all is well.

Here's a couple of ideas. The fence and surroundings are as interesting as the squirrel... so maybe the squirrel just adds a little something to them. It could depend on whether you want a picture that's landscape or portrait orientation.

[crazyfly1]

Hey Tommy,
I like the idea of "Oh, hey, there's a squirrel down there!) I like the portrait. Interesting how your crop is similar to mine but shifting the little guy to the lower left makes all the difference. Nice interpretation, thank you.

[0lBaldy]

Originally Posted by crazyfly1

I used the crop overlay that has the curlyque thing (not sure what thats called or if it has a name) I put the curl over the squirls eye. Let me know what you would do and what you think of mine.

I didn't use the Golden Spiral or Golden Rectangle,Golden Triangles, Rule of Thirds or Golden Ratio (sure a lot of Golden things out there) I Just eyeballed it and focused on the squirrel.. I enjoy finding different pictures within a picture,, there are even more by eliminating the furry guy.... Nice Shot!

There is a script for all those cropping aids for Photoshop CS2, CS3 or CS4 posted here if anyone is interested: Golden proportion cropping tool in Photoshop -- Go (Scroll down for newer versions)

[crazyfly1]

OlBaldy, I like the first crop the best. Thank you for the compliment!

Your links are FANTASTIC! Sooo helpful. I have been playing with the script for an hour and now I have to tear myself away to go to work. This will entertain me for who knows how long, I can't wait to get home and pull up old pics and run the script on them and see how close I came with the crop and see how much better they could be.
I haven't had a chance to read these links yet
http://photoinf.com/Golden_Mean/
I wonder if you could describe to me the difference between "the golden rule" and "the rule of thirds"? They seem very similar. I'm also curious about "the golden triangle" it behaves differently in the photoshop script than it does in lightroom.
Again, thank you very much!

[Kraellin]

there's an old trick to cropping (along with what danny posted about thirds). what you ask is not what you want to keep, you ask what isnt important and there's your picture. however, that gets mitigated by things like the squirrel isnt in focus. you could try an unsharp mask to make him a bit clearer, but if that doesnt work then you allow for more unimportant area to be included to mask the blurry central object. you add more material to distract from the blurry central object. frankly, i'd try the unsharp mask but the main point is, you dont ask what you want to keep, you ask what is unimportant to the shot or to the overall communication and that will reveal what's truly important to the shot.

[crazyfly1]

Thank you Kraellin, I didn't really realize that he wasn't in focus. I wonder if blurring everything else a little would work? Sounds like a reasonable way to approach cropping, although it might be difficult for me as I tend to find interest in anything shiny or colorful, I'm kind of a magpie I guess.
BTW, always wondered what OlBaldy's name was.

[Kraellin]

well, he isnt badly out of focus and like i said, a usm could probably help.

i was also looking at this pic again today and i realized you already have a natural crop within the picture already. if you look, you'll see that the squirrel is framed by the fence and the trunk of the tree (which is where the camera actually focused, the tree trunk). so, you already have a natural crop. i'd just eliminate all the rest.