So I was strolling around downtown San Diego the other day (for reasons), and I stumbled across a couple of nice looking strangers in the middle of an intersection. I had my camera in hand (with a 28 mm lens attached) and reflexively snapped off a photo without even really thinking. I have no idea who they are or why they were standing still, motionless and smiling, in the middle of the intersection, but I figured a photo was absolutely in order.
I'm posting it here because I'm perplexed on how I would like to crop the photo. Now mind you, I'm pretty experienced with cropping photos with various "rules" of composition in mind. But I struggled for hours on this one.
Figure 1. Mostly un-cropped version. It obviously needs some more cropping; the people off to the right are distracting, and there's nothing even close to "filling the frame." (By the way, if you're wondering about the moiré patterns on the walls, they're not actually moiré patterns at all, but are rather actually part of the architecture. The pattern is actually there in real life.)
Figure 2. This is the crop I went with. It's a compromise. I'm giving up "filling the frame" here to highlight the subjects' isolation together with the unsettling architectural patterns in the background. I wish I had moved a couple of feet to the right to remove the "tree in the head" issue, but it's too late for that now.
Figure 3. Here's a tighter crop, but I feel it looses much of context of the background.
Figure 4. An even tighter crop that looses all background.
So anyway, I went with the crop in fig. 2. I have to say though, each crop brings up its own list of questions.
