From the course: The Practicing Photographer

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The shape of the frame

The shape of the frame

From the course: The Practicing Photographer

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The shape of the frame

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- Like all creative endeavors, producing a photo is simply a process of making choices. You need to choose where things go in the frame. You need to choose if the image will be black and white or colored. You need to choose how much shadow detail there will be, how much highlight detail there will be, whether motion will be blurred or frozen and so on. One of the most important choices you can make is one that a lot of photographers forget about, and that is the shape of the frame, otherwise known as aspect ratio or the crop. Now, I think most people are used to the idea of cropping in post-production. You know, you're working on an image, the composition is off, or there's something extra in the frame so you decide to crop. That's great. I've said here before that despite its humble technology, the crop tool is actually probably the most powerful tool in your image editing arsenal because it allows you to recompose…

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