NYC Snowstorm

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Cropping conundrum: The Canon G2 captures a four megapixel image, as shown in Fig. "Original" -- this gives tremendous cropping freedom when authoring for the web, where as little as 1/4 of the full image is still enough pixels for the large version of the main image.

This cropping freedom, though, is for the Rube the most nerve-wracking part of the process -- a battle between trying to keep all the interesting details, with the realization that the more details are kept in, the less impact each has.

The Rube took this picture only because it was of people having fun in the park; he only paid attention to the father and the kid in the saucer, and pressed the button when sliding saucer got far enough away from the top to separate the figures. At home he saw that it was the foreground kid who actually made it from a "nothing" to a "something" picture. It made it like a baseball pitcher and catcher. Then he saw that the 6 figures made a big triangle, but opted for the smaller one with just kids. He also liked the curved tree trunks at right, and the shapes of the spruce, the gazebo, and the two towers behind the man. He opted just for the curved tree trunks.

After all the other decisions (how white the snow, how bright yellow the saucer, etc.) he ended up with something he was sick of looking at but hopefully would like again when seeing it afresh.

Then he tried some alternate crops. Figure 1 gives the curved trunks at left more prominence. This one he now hates. In Figure 2 he brought the other elements back in, which meant the foreground kid had to go because he made the picture too high and narrow. With this one he discovered he liked how the curve of the woods echoed the curve of the slope, and tried to accentuate it by giving the woods a reddish tint.

Figure 3 is his only other shot of this scene, taken moments before, and this he cropped all-out to the trees on the right.

Which finally led him around to the conclusion that those trees were in fact irrelevant -- if he were to do it again, he would crop it with the father at the optical center (3/5's of the way up); leave the woman in, she's not hurting anything; and bring out the woods and slope to enhance the sense that it is a real space.