Crop or not to crop that is the question

Henri Cartier-Bresson, the father of street photography worked with a Leica rangefinder and a 50 mm lens for almost all of his life's work. Most street photographers either use 35 mm or 50 mm. 28 mm is quite rare.

35 mm focal length is a good middle ground. You need to get a little closer to your subjects compared to 50 mm, but again getting closer is a good technique you need to develop anyway.

I was a bit worried of being stuck with a fixed 28 mm lens with Leica Q-P. On the one hand I could take great landscape or architectural photographs with a wide angle lens. But it was too wide for street photography. .

I had made some calculations earlier by carefully considering print sizes, dynamic range, sensor size and sensor pixel count. I figured out I could live with 35 mm crop. After running intensive tests, the idea turned out to work really well in practice.

35 mm digital crop offered me an additional advantage I could not initially think of. During post-processing it gave me ability to adjust the frame with a good degree of freedom for a better composition.

In this post I will explain how I used 35 mm crop with my Leica Q-P.

But first I need to tell you about my goal.

My goal is to take great pictures of street photography and present them in printed books or exhibitions where I need to frame each picture in fixed size with consistent quality. 

Without crop, Leica Q-P's 28 mm lens produces images with a size 6000 x 4000 pixels (24 MP).

With an f/1.7 OIS capable 28 mm lens, a camera with a full frame sensor, a lightning speed focus and a 35 mm digital crop, I could achieve these:

• Great dynamic range and image quality.
• 4,800 x 3,200 pixel (15.4 MP) image size.  
• 16" x 10.67" photo quality prints in 300 dpi.
• 24" x 16" good quality prints  in 200 dpi. 

Tip: In digital photography ability to apply arbitrary crop sizes pushes the photographer to laziness which often curbs their ability to compose, a skill they need to be good at. My advice is, work with fixed size digital crops such as 35 mm or 50 mm. Like old masters who did not have the crop option, get into the habit of forming good compositions while shooting. Most rangefinders or EVFs show you a crop rectangle frame (Leica Q has one), so that you can frame your composition prior to shooting. Even if you make mistakes, for example an unwanted element creeps inside the frame, or you want to achieve a better composition, you can always move the crop rectangle in your image editing software.

Leica Q produces full size raw images regardless of crop mode set during shooting. The image processing software I use, DxO PhotoLab 2, disregards crop settings and the image is shown in 28 mm proportions. I developed a script that allows me to draw a 35 mm crop rectangle on all of my images in one go. Here is an example after running the script.

© 2019, Ergun Çoruh, All Rights Reserved.

This is how I framed my composition when I took the picture, but in this case it is not what I wanted. This is an action photograph, the riders were riding fast, and I was using the track focus mode. I missed to include the rider at the back of the pack which resulted in an undesirable composition.

The fix is easy. Simply moving the crop rectangle without resizing it, would give me the same resolution and image quality but better composition.

© 2019, Ergun Çoruh, All Rights Reserved.

Here are the images imported after the crop is applied. The first one has original centered crop, the second one has moved crop.

© 2019, Ergun Çoruh, All Rights Reserved.

© 2019, Ergun Çoruh, All Rights Reserved.

The rider in the front does not have perfect focus as I intended to have. That's because my shutter speed was left in Auto and this picture has shutter speed of 1/200s while I was moving my camera. But that's another story for "Action Photography".