Note: I have no clue what I am talking about on any kind of technical level. This is purely the opinion and advice of a rank amateur. All photos were taken with a cheap Kodak camera and cropped using Picasa, Google's free image editing and organizing program.

One of the best pieces of writing advice I have heard was in Stephen King's autobiography-cum-writing manual "On Writing". It was delivered to him by the editor of a small town newspaper when Mr. King turned in his first article.

"When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story, " he said. "When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story."

When I was writing, this piece of advice helped me tremendously, allowing me to just write without worrying about how it was coming out. Had I not discovered how horrible of a writer I was before finishing my first novel, I am sure the second piece of the advice would have helped as well. I also think this advice works for other art forms as well; music, dance, painting, photography. In fact, the corollary to this rule is the quote by William Strunk, "A sentence should contain no extra words, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts."

In photography, the simplest form of editing (rewriting) is cropping. Cropping is simply the removal of unwanted parts of an image. In relation to the quote above, when you take a picture you are trying to capture what you see that is of interest to you, when you crop you are removing everything that is not what you are trying to capture.

Let's take a look at this picture that I recently took in the parking lot of an O'Charley's in B'ham.

Nothing really wrong with this picture, per se, as a candid, in-the-moment snapshot; but it isn't terribly exciting either. There isn't much going on and there seems to be a lack of focus as to what the picture is about. So let's start with a severe crop to remove everything but the two faces. We also need to line up the faces in the correct parts of the picture. In cinematography, there is a concept known as the rule of thirds. I have no idea if it applies to photography or not, but I will proceed assuming that it does. The rule of thirds states that if you were to imagine the image with two equally spaced horizontal lines and two equally spaced vertical lines separating the image into nine equal squares, objects placed at the intersection of these lines will be where the eye is drawn. So taking those factors into account, I created this crop.

Trying to get both of them to line up close to the rule of thirds was difficult and required me to zoom close and reveal some of the pixelization. The effect I was going for was to make the image about both people. But what if I wanted to isolate one of them, and make the picture more about them, without cutting the other person out of the shot?

By placing the guy close to one of the intersections, this image becomes more about him. Even though it features both people, the eye seems to be more naturally drawn to him. Can we switch the roles of the people? We can try.

This one didn't turn out as well as I had hoped. Even though I tried to make the image more about the girl while including both people in the image, the eye is still somewhat drawn to the guy, I think due to the fact that he is closer to the camera. Perhaps I'm just not good enough at this to accomplish what I wanted to in this image.

In the next installment of this article, I will attempt to crop a shot taken by most everyone who goes to a certain famous city.