Picture in picture: the occasional crop
Sometimes the perfect shot is not correct ‘in-camera’. Some need a bit of love afterwards in Lightroom
I perform post-processing on every wedding photo in your delivery set to ensure the highest level of quality and to give it the Nick Church Photography style and tone of my work. But what is often not obvious is that the original photo may have been a wider shot that I’ve cropped down.
Photographers always aim to get a crop right in camera, but there are times when this is not possible or sometimes it’s only during the post-processing that you see an ‘image within the image’ that makes it much stronger.
In this case however, it was less of a ‘moment of vision’ and simply that I was not using a zoom lens and knew that I didn’t have enough time to ‘zoom with my feet’. The bride of the day was about to walk into the ceremony, when I spotted the girls playing by the mirror. There was no time to get closer to the little mischiefs as I would miss the bride’s entrance. Realistically, I knew I had about 5 seconds, so as long as I got them in shot I could sort it out later to make them the feature of the image.
Of course, there is a limit to how much you can do this with photography. The CSI sequence of cropping, then enlarging then cropping etc etc so you can see the registration plate of a car in the reflection of someone’s tears is nonsense, with today’s technology at least. The smaller the crop, the lower the resolution of the resulting image and if you take it too far you will start to see blocks from individual pixels.
This is one of the reasons that I use such high resolution cameras. It is not often that I need to crop this heavily, but when I do I’m pleased with the flexibility offered by the 42 Megapixels in the Sony A7Riii cameras that I use. The downside of such high resolution cameras is that for the other 99.9% of shots that do not need this treatment, I have to deal with such huge files which are slower to work on and more expensive to store. What resolution is best for weddings continues to be a debate that rages on.
But just occasionally having this potential to crop can make an image possible that would otherwise not be, and this is a perfect example. Ok, so the bride and groom would never have known if I did not get this shot in the bag, but they are definitely pleased I did.
A small part of me wanted to leave in the exceptionally good film-maker, as it is Mr Ethan Church; son number 1. Nick Church Photography; keeping it in the family.