question for professional portrait and street photographers (if we have any in here)...

[Gato Moteado]

...and, really anyone with educated opinions on the subject.

maybe it's more of an observation than a question....

i study the photographs of many professionals (and amateurs) who i like and whose work i find inspirational. in fact, i probably spend way too much time doing that.

re: portrait shooters, the attention to detail that i see in the work of leibovitz and avedon, for example, is much of what makes me critical of my own work. today, i was looking closely at the work of diane arbus, who i first found in college in a "history of photography" class. her subjects are interesting because they are people who seem to live in the margins of society. but today i noticed that, in a lot of her work, she crops off hands and feet, something that portrait and street shooters consider a no-no. there are places on the arms and legs where a crop is acceptable, but i think most photographers agree that you don't chop off hands and feet at the wrists and ankles. here are a couple examples (but if you scroll through galleries of her work, you'll see it's fairly common):





so i guess my question is something like:
did arbus (and others considered great, then and now) just lose the attention to something considered so important or did they know what they were doing and did it anyway? and if their work is considered to be monumental, why are people so critical of others who inadvertently truncate extremities? i admit, when i see it now (even tho i'm guilty of losing concentration in the moment and making the same mistake myself) it's like fingernails on a chalkboard.

[MLAA]

1. Interesting. Her choice of chopping off parts somehow seems to work for me given her

striking choices of people she photographed. I mean, say the same effect on a portrait of a popular icon probably wouldn’t feel right. But it does seem to add to her capturing marginalized or rare (at the time) couples.

[Gato Moteado]

2. i have to admit to you...

...that i tried to look at it in that exact way. but it only lasted about 10 seconds. then the fingernails hit the chalkboard again.

[MLAA]

4. The only thing that is like nails on chalkboard are whiny, hypocritical assholes talking (I

literally have a physical reaction) and actual nails on chalkboard. I’m very sensitive to sounds I can not enjoy a movie when people nearby are eating popcorn and it even sounds unusually loud when I eat popcorn. So I’m audio triggered and you are visually triggered. Go figure.

[Gato Moteado]

5. well....those things you mentioned do the same to me, also...

...sometimes i think i'm too intolerant. and, i'm even intolerant of intolerance!

[Eyeball_Kid]

3. They knew what they were doing and did it anyway.

That’s my HO. I’ve been an amateur photographer for over fifty years. I know how my framing affects the content. I will sometimes leave extremities out of the frame if I want the viewer to focus on other content, or if the extremities don’t contribute to the purpose of the photo. At other times, the extremities tell the story.

[Gato Moteado]

7. i think that leaving extremeties out of the frame is very common....

...tighter crops are often the way to go. the issue i'm talking about is where the truncating is done.

this is kinda the general consensus on where to and where not to crop a person:

[ManiacJoe]

9. Great chart!

I might quibble with the top of the head as drawn. If you are going to crop off the top of the head, it should be enough of the head to be seen as an obvious choice of crop instead of a small amount that looks like a mistake.

[Grumpy Old Guy]

10. Very interesting chart.

I've never seen that before. Thanks for posting it.

I've directed many thousands of TV interviews, both live and pretaped, and I dealt with this everyday. I never saw the issue presented in this manner. I always kept an eye on the corners of the frame just to watch for chopped extremities.

I've also zoomed in tight on faces during an interview, cutting off the top of a head, but only if the weight of what the person was saying merited it. Perhaps Arbus felt "the moment" justified her composition.

Or, it may just be that she was one of those artists who felt that rules were meant to be broken.

Here is a similar question for you. Every good photographer, cinematographer, or camera operator knows to always put a human subject to one side or the other, looking into the rest of the frame. And yet, sometimes it is more effective to have them looking out of the frame.

Rules were meant to be broken. Sometimes that's what sets an image apart.

[Gato Moteado]

13. yes, negative or leading space in a photo...

...definitely makes it more interesting. i do this a lot with wildlife photography. but, sometimes a direct, head on, looking-straight-into-the-camera portrait is appropriate.

[Grumpy Old Guy]

14. I do it with wildlife too.

[Grumpy Old Guy]

11. I agree with Maniac Joe.

It has to look deliberate.

[AndyS]

6. They just screwed up but

had attained enough notoriety to get away with it and have people attribute the oversight to some hidden meaning.

It saves the time, effort and embarrassment of doing a re-shoot.

[Gato Moteado]

8. that's kinda what i figured as well....

....back when a lot of these folks were shooting (arbus died in 1971), they used cameras that didn't have zoom lenses (arbus used a rolleiflex twin lens reflex), so you couldn't widen the view in the camera and if you were shootin' from the hip and trying to catch a decisive or candid instant, looking behind you to move back or asking your subject to step back could ruin the moment, i guess.

[Grumpy Old Guy]

12. I used a Yashicamat for several years.

I always likes the extra "real estate" of a 6x6cm frame. However, every once in a while I messed up and had to crop something important out to produce a rectangular image.

[Ms. Toad]

15. A few thoughts

Arbus was shooting with film - which doesn't always have the same ratio as the paper on which the photo is printed. A 35 mm camera (her early work) has a 3:2 ratio. A medium format Rolleiflex (her later work) has variety of ratios (none of which are 5:4). An 10x8 paper has a 5:4 ratio, so cropping is required when printing - you chop the top end or the bottom end. The crop may be a printing choice (choosing an awkward limb crop to allow for a better placement of the focus of the image - e.g. including the hands in the top image would have put the beehive hair at or past the top of the image).

The second is the type of camera she used - a medium format Rolleiflex. This type of camera (a twin lens reflex) is a great one for street photography, since you look down into the camera to focus (?w=620" target="_blank">Here's a photo of Elizabeth Taylor using one so you can see what I'm talking about). That makes it far easier to take unposed photos since the subject doesn't necessarily know they are being photographed. One challenge is that the arrangement of lenses in that camera creates a parallax error. What the photographer sees isn't identical to what the camera sees - which can result in odd crops/framing.

The third is that Arbus began her photography work as a commercial photographer, rather than fine art, which has different "rules."

Finally - sometimes photographers choose to break the rules. A lot of Arbus's images break the rules of fine art photography.

I am a very traditional photographer. I try to be extremely careful about where I crop images - so when I see "poorly" cropped images of people I cringe. I don't generally like the focus of an image to be dead center - I'm far more likely to put a center of focus at the cross of the lines of thirds - The dark hand in the top image is roughly 1/3 of the way from the right side (a "good" location on one of the lines of thirds) - but another traditional option would have placed it 1/3 of the way from the top - along the same vertical line - where the top horizontal line and the right vertical line cross.

I'm also pretty rigid about horizons being horizontal - absent a clear choice to place it on an angle.

I'm enjoying my retirement by taking photography (and other) classes. My B&W film photography class last semester reminded me of (1) how lazy digital photography has made me and (2) that when I am doing film photography I have to accept less-than-perfect images because I only know if I've gotten a decent shot after I develop the film and do a test print. It took 8 rolls of film (36 shots/roll) and 145 sheets of paper to print the 30 images I ultimately submitted. I could have done with fewer rolls of film, except for the bracketing requirement of the course which required 3 shots of each scene. But the excessive quantity of paper used was me being a perfectionist about framing, exposure, print contrast, etc.

I probably still won't vote for photographs which break the rules in the DU photography contests. But my recent experience has reminded me that perfection in the film world is a lot different than perfection in the digital world.

[Gato Moteado]

16. maybe guidelines is a better word....

...than rules.

and also, i want to clarify that i wasn't trying to be critical of arbus, or any great artist, but rather, i was trying to understand her/their relationship to the "guidelines" we perceive as pertaining to the creation of well crafted art, in this case photographic images. when i "break the rules" in my photography, it's almost always out of sloppiness, carelessness, not being mindful in the moment.

i also considered the parallax "defense" before i made the original post here, but i think that is less of a factor at the distance one would be to take the type of portraits arbus was shooting. sure, you're going to see the issue on very close-up shots, but when you're fitting a couple people into a frame, you are standing back a ways. and, i assume that if parallax was a factor in those types of shots, every photographer using a twin lens reflex camera would be accustomed to increasing the distance to their subject to give themselves more headroom (and footroom) because of it.

arbus is gone, so we can't ask her why she did what she did. it's possible the truncation of extremities was an oversight. it's also possible it was deliberate. i agree that artists "break the rules" of fine art photography, and it's usually to enhance or accentuate some emotion or to make a visual statement, the way "breaking the rules" in music does...i'm just not sure how the uncomfortable truncation of extremities or limbs does any of that in these photos...but, i'm open to trying to understand it. i would think that composition is an equally important element in fine art photography as are proper focus (and limited or extended depth of field) and exposure. but, it's also possible that these "rules" of cropping weren't really a thing in the 40s, 50s and 60s. who knows?

i agree with you on rule of thirds composition and level horizons...though sometimes a perfectly centered subject is the way to go, especially in today's world of square aspect ratios on instagram and tight crops. the crooked horizon never looks right to me and i suspect 99.9% of the time it's just carelessness...whenever i see a crooked shot of the ocean or a lake, i imagine the water draining out of the photograph.

i cut my teeth on black and white film photography in the late 70s and early 80s. i did my own processing and printing, as well. i do not want to go back to that, despite trending toward laziness or carelessness at times, for all the reasons you mentioned. i love digital photography!

[Ms. Toad]

17. B&W film was where I started (early 70's)

I'm not a purist either way.

I haven't touched a film camera since the late 80s (by which time I no longer had access to a darkroom). The last time I remember using it was in '89 on a trip to the Soviet Union. My practice at that time was to buy postcards just in case the photos didn't turn out.

Going back to it I was surprised at (1) how much I love the darkroom process, (2) how crappy my lighting is in my house, (3) the difference between a normal lens on a digital camera v. film (I needed much more room in small quarters to get pictures), (4) how much I counted on instantly being able to assess and retake shots if need be (for a few critical shots (self-portriats) I actually used both cameras to get a sense of what was in the line of shot), and (5) that there actually is a precise process to control contrast (at least with modern paper), (6) and how helpful it was to be forced into some rigid rules (e.g. no darkroom cropping).

(1) and (5) were the happiest surprises - although these shouldn't have been a surprise. I've been battling purists about electronic v. physical darkrooms. Certainly image control is easier and cheaper in an electronic darkroom, as my paper bill will establish! But my contention has always been that most electronic darkroom work is based on tools and techniques in the physical darkroom. I do a lot of post-processing of my images and (aside from restoring old photos or similar creative activities) have never seen it different from what I used to do in the physical darkroom. It was nice to get back in touch with the original tools.

I do love the digital flexibility of not being limited to single film speed - and the luxury of knowing immediately whether I got the money shot. I also love the ability to easily share images.

I'm completely self-trained. At the time when classes might have been available (in college), I was hard core math/physics - the only classes I took outside of those fields were the ones required to get teaching certification. It is a real luxury to be able to get some formal training. While I hated not being able to crop - and lost a few really great shots because I couldn't get close enough to the subject without cropping - the rigidity of not being able to crop forced me to develop much better control of my camera.

It is very interesting to be hanging out with art students in their 20s (who, by and large, already have significantly more formal art training than I do -since my last art class was in the 8th grade) but zero experience with film photography. It was surprising to learn that, not only was my image control better than theirs, but my artistic eye is at least as good as theirs are. They may have better language to describe it, but I am at least as able to capture it as they are.

Tomorrow is the first day of my digital/color photography class! I'm really looking forward to it - and we'll see how the digital skills of a 66 year old geezer match with those of digital natives!

But back to your question - I can't find any history of the development of rules for cropping. I suspect they developed over time by recognition of which crops made the most aesthetically pleasing photographs - perhaps even from painted portraits. Dorothea Lange (similar era) uses more traditional cropping.

I did find one more clue - she intentionally chose the square frame format (1:1 ratio). That is problematic for images focusing on a single person. Bodies are longer than they are wide, for the most part. That creates a lot of space on the sides - which can be minimized by cropping out part of the body. That explains why crop at all - not necessarily where she cropped.

As to the parallax question - I think the camera she was using would also have shown more of the bottom part of the image than less. But it seems she was printing full-frame, so pulling back to get more of the body (and then cropping) seems like less of an option/riskier.

A final thought is related to her photography of unconventional subjects. She may have used unconventional cropping to enhance what she wanted the viewer to see about her unconventional subjects.. Here's an article about her use of non-conventional photography and subjects: https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/881/1056 (I haven't read clear through it - my spouse wants me to get off the computer! I've bookmarked it to come back and read later.)

[Gato Moteado]

18. very cool...i'll check out the link.....

....i hope you'll share your work with us.

re: digital cameras not limiting you to a static ISO like you would be limited until you finished a roll of film...yes, that is awesome...the other thing is that sensors just keep getting better and cleaner in low light and high ISO. i remember pushing and push processing tri-x film to 800 ASA and 1600 ASA so i could shoot low light concerts and the results were so grainy, it was always disappointing. here's a shot i took in the shade at ISO 12,000...imagine doing that with film:

[Ms. Toad]

19. I did a lot of non-flash photography for my daughter's high school drama productions.

No way I could have done that with my film camera!

I chose my first digital cameras for their low light performance.

Here's my favorite shot from the B&W film course (it loses a bit being translated from a print back to electronic). I shared it earlier in its own thread.

Self-portrait (The scar is from the removal of an aggressive cancer - it's "limb sparing" surgery, but nearly always leaves disfiguring scars, including a matching scar on an upper leg where the graft was removed from. This photo is doing some work in the sarcoma community, helping people accept the beauty in imperfection.)

[Gato Moteado]

20. great shot....please stay healthy......

...which low light digital camera did you get?

[Ms. Toad]

21. Thanks!

My first digital camera was a C-4040, initially. Then a C-7070. The first was far better than the second in low light, but the resolution ended up not being sufficient.

Now I have a Nikon - I forget which model. Also not nearly as good for low light.

I'm working on staying healthy. I just reached two years NED (no evidence of disease). That means instead of having a CT scan every 3 months to look for metastasis I get to go for 6 months.