It's no secret that I love playing with photos - especially cropping them into squares to suit my postcard-stamp styled blog layout! We all trim photos all the time, be it on our computers, to fit them into a frame, snipping them to suit a scrapbooking page, mounting them on a book cover, or slicing and dicing them for the front of a birthday card. There are plenty of reasons we might chop up a photo, and whatever reason motivates us:
the number one thing to remember when you crop photos is to TELL A STORY.
Here's 3 examples of what I mean and 3 things you can try next time you, well, have time!
Going clockwise from top left (you can click on the image to enlarge it to see what I mean);
1. "I'm getting bigger" - be inspired by the moment in Alice in Wonderland when she took a bite of the 'eat me' cake, and cut elements out of two or three 'standing tall' photos, then put them back together again, leaving space between them. Whilst you may get too many hands or feet, you will get a crazy elongated version of your little person 'growing up' in an abstract way that exaggerates the point.
2. "The two of us" - of course there's nothing nicer than seeing two lovely faces in a double frame, but why not experiment. Put a couple (husband and wife, or brothers and sisters etc) looking from one frame into the other, back at each other, or as I did (as they were doing in the photo) have one looking out, and the other staring up at big sister. Now, perhaps I should have put little Lotti lower in her frame to accentuate her being smaller and shorter than her sister, but her frame was starting to look a little too empty, so I left her just slightly off center - you can be the judge whether that worked or not - remember it's all about having fun, and that means personal taste not perfection.
2. "Focus on the little things" - the girls were being photographed before a 'big event', and were very excited, and a little nervous and to me, the feet rolling about impatiently in brand new little shoes says it all.
For more ideas to get you inspired about photography, have a quick look at the HowTo guides, or search the Photography Labels on this blog, or sign up for my monthly newsletters... no go on... get photo-crafty! x
