filmtwit
Desperate but not serious
a day with Andre D. Wagner -- NYC Street Photography -- Walkie Talkie ep. 16
ABout Andre
Andre's Instagram
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Mentor
Beautiful work!
Freakscene
Obscure member
I find it very interesting; his tones are very nice and the subjects are amazing, but he crops something out of almost every photo that he takes that drives me absolutely nuts. I was so frustrated by it that I closed the website and stopped watching the YouTube video. It is so consistent that he must be doing it on purpose. Different view. His work is great, but it isn’t for me.
Marty
Marty
filmtwit
Desperate but not serious
Why is cropping so annoying?
Freakscene
Obscure member
Things that I perceive should be there are not, I really don’t like important picture elements crossing the edges of the frame, the photos look incomplete. Sid Grossman could do it and, to me, his approach gave a sense of closeness and urgency. These, to me, look badly composed.
It’s just how I see them.
Marty
Retro-Grouch
Well-known
No arguing with taste, so I would be the last to say you're wrong! However, consider that this compositional technique opens tremendous opportunities for creating visual and psychological tensions in an image, besides those offered by line, shape, color, etc. Painters (especially the Impressionists) and photographers began to learn this from each other in the second half of the 19th century. See this, by Degas: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/34679 .
I've found over the years that techniques that I found annoying or just poor choices have come to be valuable tools under certain circumstances. For example, my photographic training was under devout adherents of the f/64 school. An out-of-focus area in a landscape photo was a mortal sin! I actually believed as much, and it took me years to reach the point where I'll now happily throw a background out of focus whenever I think it works. Some of our training is formal, but most of it isn't; our taste is formed by the lifetime of images we're exposed to, ones that we're told are "good". Sometimes, turning off what we "know" about good composition can lead us to a new appreciation of a body of work we might otherwise reject.
However, I will probably burn in hell for those out-of-focus backgrounds...
I've found over the years that techniques that I found annoying or just poor choices have come to be valuable tools under certain circumstances. For example, my photographic training was under devout adherents of the f/64 school. An out-of-focus area in a landscape photo was a mortal sin! I actually believed as much, and it took me years to reach the point where I'll now happily throw a background out of focus whenever I think it works. Some of our training is formal, but most of it isn't; our taste is formed by the lifetime of images we're exposed to, ones that we're told are "good". Sometimes, turning off what we "know" about good composition can lead us to a new appreciation of a body of work we might otherwise reject.
However, I will probably burn in hell for those out-of-focus backgrounds...