I agree with Arti and Pesto. I use the rule of thirds also, but not only at the intersecting points, but in the spaces as well. As a general rule I either 1. put the subject in the center, or 2. put them to one side or the other at the intersecting lines. Of course the beauty of digital is that you can crop and if you don't like it, do it again. Good luck!

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cropping is really subjective as well as technical - the rule of thirds works well when you have portraits, etc but not so great at times you have a jumble of stuff. Also, for scrapping, you have all your page elements to draw the eye to your photo so the rule of thirds isn't as important in many cases... you might crop a photo all the way into a face for example.

Cropping also brings up the discussion of photography equipment as well... its really the only time I feel that MP's come into play with a digital camera. In general, the higher the MP, the more you can crop and still get a decent photo.. of course, sharpness is also the key - if the photo isn't sharp to begin with, cropping will certainly magnify that.

A good example is a photo I took of a heron a few years back using a 200-500 zoom with 1.4 teleconverter on it and a 6MP camera. The photo when viewed on the PC normally wasn't bad.. zooming in certainly showed a bit of fuzziness as well as aberations from the atmosphere... when I tried to crop it, whamo - major unsharpness and clearly not my best work. Pulling out some of the sharpening tools I use in photoshop clearly made a huge difference... but couldn't save the photo and I ended up reverting back to the original and just using that for a layout and print.

In this case, I needed a better fixed zoom lens to capture that bird from that distance which would have enabled me to do the kinda of crop I wanted to... also, if I had been using a 10 or 12 MP camera.. I would have had more data to work with for the crop.

So... I guess it is important to keep all this in mind when cropping... but the important thing is to have fun!!

Something I read that's been useful to me. . . Don't crop at a joint. In other words, don't crop at the knees, elbows, etc. Instead, crop in between.

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Yes... don't cut body parts off.. but again.. there might be times in scrapping that you want to... I've seen some great examples for broken arms where the arm in the cast and elbow is shown... but not the shoulder, etc... it all depends on the actual purpose of the photo.

If for fine art usage.. then yes...

Oh you guys... who thought this would get to be such a hot topic... thanks for all the info...

I am sticking with my "hmmmmmmmm that looks ok " rule LOL

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