I looked at a magazine today that is the--sorta-official magazine of photojournalism. Its like a trade mag in a way that provides us with news that affects our business and promotes photojournalism and the good that it can do(it also provides important stories about when we're not doing what we should.) This particular magazine featured this year's Pulitzer Prize winners one of which is a very close friend of mine Craig F. Walker of the Denver Post. So I'm pretty familiar with Craig's images possibly looking at them more than anyone beyond Craig, his wife Jamie and his boss Tim. So if something doesn't look right I notice it. The signature photo from his story on Scott Ostrom was cropped from a horizontal into a squarish vertical in order to fit some layout scheme. The photo which was also a centralized composition now appears in the magazine as this sort of off-centered unbalanced photo. The space around Ostrom in Craig's photo was important---soooo important. There was a line in an old photojournalism book I have somewhere compares creating photos to fit a specific shape or size in a newspaper is akin to the impossibility of trying to fill in the whole that exists in the editors head that made such a request. I believe the same thought applies to poorly cropping a photo that works perfectly uncropped. I chose to write about this today and use the example of a picture I took at my niece's wedding. Here is a reason--a good reason to crop a photo. I shot this angle wide in order to get the feel of the couple entering the reception hall filled with their friends and family. But, the original had a lot of ceiling and floor in it---unnecessary information that took away from really seeing what was happening in the photograph. All of the important information was centralized in the composition and by cropping out the exit signs and the ceiling lights and the baron dance floor, we can zoom into the most important elements, the bride and groom. Its really that simple and yet ever since photographers began making pictures we have had the same damn debate over and over and over again. It seems that we should've learned by now--but we haven't and its even more frustrating when an editor of a magazine about photojournalism doesn't get it. Photograph by Uncle Dick.