Nature Photography How To

Excessive image cropping has always been a controversial topic because of the loss in quality that can occur. But with today’s hi-res digital cameras, you can often crop an image to your heart’s content and still end up with plenty of resolution for good-size prints.

Cropping enables you to compose a scene loosely, so you can adjust perspective, converging verticals, and other problems without sacrificing any critical components of the image. It also permits using wider lenses and slower shutter speeds when you don’t have a tripod available to steady a long telephoto.

In the helpful tutorial below, pro adventure/travel photographer Toma Bonciu demonstrates how he uses extreme cropping to create more compelling landscape images. As you’ll see, Bonciu’s approach is simple to accomplish, but it delivers images with the WOW factor and can actually increase the quality of your photos.

Bonciu uses ten of his photos to illustrate how to get the job done. You’ll see how cropping can balance an image, modify perspective and aspect ratio, and enable you to employ compositional aids like the Rules of Thirds.

So pull out some of your landscape images, and see how much you can improve them with a bit of extreme cropping. There are more great tips on Bonciu’s YouTube channel, and in this tutorial we posted earlier explaining how to avoid mistakes made by beginning landscape photographers.