In the era of digital photography, it can feel like cropping is a sin. It’s incredibly easy to crop a digital image, but it comes with a loss of pixels. If you worship at the altar of image quality, throwing away pixels, especially a large portion of them, feels sacrilegious. Just frame your shot better and you won’t have to crop, the purist may say. For my own photography, however, I have discovered that cropping in different aspect ratios can sometimes create more visually cohesive image.
I was initially reluctant to crop much, as I currently shoot on an APS-C sensor camera, the Sony a6400, which in theory means that the image captured by the sensor has limited resolution. However, this comparison is being made against a full-frame camera, the largest sensor camera the average person will get their hands on. APS-C is great if you think about it in that context. (I will come back to this remark.)
After getting over my pixel anxiety, I started looking at interesting ways of cropping my photos. Then, as fate may have it, I stumbled upon GXAce’s fantastic video about the Hasselblad XPan, an exotic film camera that shoots 65mmx24mm frames of 35mm film. Readers may remember his video on the Glimmerglass 1 influencing me to try it as my first diffusion filter. His video on the XPan discussed the cinema-still aesthetic that shooting these super-wide sdhots provided, so I just had to try this aspect ratio on my own photos. After all, you can get the same effect by cropping a larger image to the XPan aspect ratio. The results speak for themselves.
I’ve found myself framing shots in the viewfinder with the forethought of cropping them down to an ultra-wide perspective later. This has been made significantly easier by shooting with a wide lens, a 24mm f2.8 (36mm equivalent due to the APS-C sensor’s 1.5x crop). Now, I mentioned earlier that an APS-C sensor is plenty big, and that’s still true. However, with a full-frame sensor, I’d be getting the full 24mm view, not a cropped 36mm version. This effectively gives a bigger view for “free” from the same lens, given that this is a full-frame lens. So now I have an incentive to upgrade to a full-frame camera body, proving yet again that being a photographer is one of the easiest ways to lose money.
