For years, slide film shooters have listened to the experts tell us to "fill the frame." The point was, with slide film, you needed to crop as tightly as possible in the camera while taking the picture. The results were tightly cropped images that literally filled the frame. There’s no doubt that those tightly cropped images delivered more impact and scored well with the judges in competition.

In today's digital world, we need to start breaking the rule about filling the frame…at least when taking the original picture. Most digital cameras on the market today deliver high resolution images that are far larger than what you need for competition. With all those extra pixels, you can start giving yourself some breathing room when you take the original shot.

Old habits die hard. After so many years of shooting slides, my "natural" tendency during a shoot is to crop the image as tightly as possible. I can’t tell you how many slides and, until recently, how many digital images I've thrown away because some essential part of the subject was cropped out of my image. But I’m slowly learning to take a step back, or zoom back a bit, when taking the picture. This gives me a higher percentage of usable images and more options during post-production.

The images on this page are an example of what I’m talking about. This first image is a full frame shot directly from my Canon 5D. The size of this image is 4368 x 2912. In the second image, I’ve added a red rectangle. The rectangle indicates how much of that full frame I really need for a BWPS competition image (1400 x 1050). This rectangle would be even smaller for competitions using the 1024 x 768 size.

I can crop the original image down to the size of that red square to get my final competition image without losing ANY image quality. The third image shows the cropping result. Note that the final image should definitely fill the frame to produce the kind of impact you want from this subject.

Some words of caution. You do not want to make the subject too small in the frame. If your cropped image ends up being smaller than 1400 x 1050, you would have to digitally enlarge your final image. Sometimes you can get away with upsizing, but your strategy should be to only use upsizing as a last resort.

Another factor to keep in mind is that the size of that red rectangle in the second image depends on the pixel size of the images your camera produces. The example above only applies to 12-megapixel cameras. Cameras that produce smaller files would result in a LARGER red rectangle. The grey and red graphics show the 1400 x 1050 rectangles for 8-, 12-, and 20-megapixel images.

20 Megapixel 5476 x 3651
12 Megapixel 4368 x 2912
8 Megapixel 3264 x 2448

So... the next time you are shooting, remember to pull back a bit on your cropping and give yourself some extra room around the edges. Stop filling the frame while shooting and you’ll be happier with the results of your shoot.