What I wanted to say is, I am of the "no crop" school of thought.
When I compose the shot, with very rare exceptions, I have already zoomed the scene I want to record, by foot or lens twisting, to the point where what I want to include in it is JUST what I want to include. Rarely more, never less.
I've been doing it that way for scores of years, and it suits me just fine.
Which is not to say my shots are without criticism. Not at all! I heavily criticise my own, in fact, but not often with respect to a need for cropping.
So, I agree with HCB's statement...he was just not a cropping type of photographer. What he saw and how he captured it was just how he wanted to portray that scene... No more, no less.
He'll be missed.
Oh, and by the way, I am certain why people called him a curmugeon.
He was undoubtedly driven to the wavering edge of insanity by having to constantly accommodate the early Leica's Rube Goldberg-ish method of cutting leaders and loading cassette film!
Poor chap...
keith whaley
frank theriault wrote:
--- mike wilson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi,
<snip>
For me, the real tosh comes in when you get the
stories about him never cropping.
It's probably more accurate to say that he "rarely" cropped or "almost" never cropped.
I think he, in his later life, claimed that he never cropped, but that's simply not true.
I read an interview by his long-time developer, a fellow by the name of Gassman, IIRC, who said that he did ~on very rare occasions~ crop. Derriere la Gare St Lazare is an example - that's the one of the guy stepping off the ladder into the huge puddle of water, caught when his foot was about an inch from hitting the water.
In a magazine, I saw a photo of the original neg, and he clearly cropped, as the whole left side was dark - something you never see in the print. Turns out he was shooting through a fence, and a picket darkened the left side of the frame, so he cut it out, because he had to.
As Gassman said, that may have been the exception that proved the rule of "no cropping".
cheers, frank, who almost never crops, because that's the way HCB did it, but I'll never ever be that good <vbg>
