Cropping is when you cut out parts of a photo to focus on the most important part or change it creatively, it can be used to highlight certain parts of an image and change the photo entirely.

I selected some of my street photography images that I took of people in St Helier Jersey and did some cropping on them.

1. Construction worker getting food

In this photo it shows a man in a hard hat, hi-vis, muddy joggers, safety goggles and a pair of work boots, the man is waiting by a food stand to get some lunch for his break and has a smile whilst waiting showing that he is a grateful to finally have a break, I wanted to make this stand out and the photo has loads of unneeded background space, so I cropped the photo inwards to just the food stand and the man, this helps pinpoint and highlights what’s going on in the photo.

Here is the photo cropped, I did a square crop so that it would highlight the man and what he is doing.

Here are some edits I did of the cropped photo:

2. Man busking in the street

In this photo it shows a man busking on the corner of a street with another man watching, I blurred out the man watching to help make the guy busking pop out of the photo, the man busking had black and red patchwork tattoos down both his legs, a band t shirt of the rock band “joy division” which helps the viewer of the photo be able to imagine what type of music he is singing due to him liking the band so much that he is wearing there t shirt, he also has a hat on the floor which he was using to collect money, this shows that he is doing it for work, I took the photo when he had his mouth open to also clearly show that he was singing.

Here is the photo cropped, I cropped it so it would show the man busking and some of the man watching him, this helps better focus on the man busking and what’s going on with him whilst also showing who it is who he is singing to.

3. Flower shop lady in the market

This photo is of a lady within the Jersey St. Helier market who owns a flower shop, it shows her at her flower shop holding a bouquet of flowers, due to her being at a flower shop it has a big range of different bright and vibrant colours, this made the photo pop out more and be attention catching but it takes the attention away from her and is quite hectic, many of the colours also clashed witch each other.

This is the photo cropped, although I like both versions of the photo I decided to crop just around the lady because the chaotic background takes away from her, this helped highlight her and present her as the main focal point of the photo.

I then did a creative circle crop of her inside off a flower, to do this i had to crop the image into a circle in photoshop, i did this by making the background the flower photo, the image of her a layer and then turning the opacity of it down so i can still see the flower and then using a eraser on the parts leaving the flower..

4. Postman carrying packages through town

This photo is of a postman wheeling packages through town, we can tell that he is a postman because he is wheeling a trolley loaded with four packages through town and he is also wearing the Jersey post uniform which is always distinguishable due to the bright red top.

This is the photo cropped, the photo had to much background space so I cropped it out and cropped around around the postman to highlight him.

5. Guy painting in the park

This photo is of a guy painting in millennium park, we can see one of his previous paintings on the floor, this style of painting is called pleinair painting which means out door painting, you can see all of his equipment on the floor and a beer in his easel to loosen him up whilst painting, I also captured some of Victoria College in the background.

When cropping the photo I did a landscape crop over him and Victoria College to draw attention to both and get rid of the excess space.

When further looking at the image a saw potential for a vertical panoramic crop going down from Victoria College.

The panoramic crop stars out with brighter lighting at the top and progressively darker lighting as you travel down the image, this helped to give the photo a really unique multitone effect just from cropping, this is how it came out:

Everything together

Here are all my cropped images after grouping them together.

Street photography is a type of photography that captures candid moments of everyday life in public places, often focusing on people and their interactions with the environment. It’s usually unposed and spontaneous, aiming to show real human emotion, behaviour, or culture in urban settings.

I did a street photography photoshoot in St Helier in the style of people like William Klein and Bruce Gilden, both William Klein and Bruce Gilden lived in New York and took messy energetic street photos.

Here are all the images I got:

After going through the images i picked out a few of my favourites that i want to use as my final images:

I then went through my favourite photos and did some light editing on them, creating a black and white copy for each one.

When creating the black and white variants I standardized them by putting the B&W 12 filter over, I chose this filter because I liked the vintage look that it gave the photos because it reminded me of the images William Klein and Bruce Gilden got.

Flower shop lady: the decisive moment for me when taking this photo was when she held up the flowers to serve a customer, capturing a realness within the photo as it shows her naturally.

Guy painting: When taking the photo I waited for him to move/lean to grab something then took the photo as my decisive moment, this created a more interesting perspective of him, I also framed him within the middle of my photo, in the bottom right corner you can see that a painting he had done previously has been squeezed into the photo, you can also see that on his easel that there is a beer he is drinking in the sun whilst he paints.

Guy busking/singing: I saw a man singing on a corner in town so i went by wall next to him to get a tiny bit of the side in the photo to add texture and alter the framing and then for the decisive moment I waited for him to open his mouth to sing.

Wheelchairs driving together: I saw two people

How does Henri Cartier-Bresson view the act of photography?

#1 Henri thought photography was an extension of the eye, it could capture things which the eyes weren’t able to, such as far away details.

#2 Capturing moments of community and precise moments, he liked to be able to preserve history and other precious moments.

Here are some of his images:

Here is what he looks like:

Describe Cartier-Bresson’s theory of the decisive moment

It is capturing the photo at the right second, it is both the perfect moment for the photographer and the subject.

If you miss the moment then it is gone.

“The simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second.”

Analysis:

This is an analysis of a photo by Cartier-Bresson

A panoramic/joiner image is showing a FOV (field of view) approximating, or greater than, that of the human eye – about 160° by 75°, it generally has a aspect ratio of 2:1 or larger, the image being at least twice as wide as it is high. The resulting images take the form of a wide strip.

1. Josef Hoflehner

• An Austrian photographer known for large-scale, minimalist panoramic landscapes and seascapes, he usually did them in black and white.

2. David Hockney

• David specialised as a painter, he used photography to create panoramic collages, capturing scenes from multiple angles and putting them together, his work is conceptual rather than traditional panoramic.

3. Ken Duncan

• An Australian landscape photographer known for his panoramic images of the Australian outback and other landscapes.

4. Thomas Struth

• Known for panoramic museum interiors and cityscapes.

5. Michael Reichmann

• A Canadian photographer who was an early advocate of digital panoramic photography.

6. Andreas Gursky

• While not always working in a traditional panoramic format, his ultra-large-scale images often span enormous horizontal spaces and can be considered panoramic.

Here are some panoramic photos I made:

Me and my group went outside to cry capture different elements of texture, we went out with an open mind and explored around the outskirts of the school to see all the different types of texture which we could find in our daily life!!!

Here’s a photo we took of a crossing on the road, the road had moss growing over the top of it which was a really cool texture and created a unique and abstract pattern throughout it, this is the original photo.

This is the photo edited.

This is a photo I took of a metal fence.

In the background of the photo you can see cars and bikes next to a building which helps to translate which it was taken in a car park.

The photo has a grain texture which gives it a vintage feel.

This is my original photo I took off my model with a white background.

Here are the photos after I went into photoshop and edited double exposure onto them.

This is a photo taken off me, this is the original version and it was taken with 2 constant lights that had different coloured see through plastic sheets, one was orange and one was green.

Here is the photo after I edited it in photoshop experimenting with double exposure.

I took this photo of two students doing a photo shoot

I then edited it

I then edited some double exposures onto the photo.

me and my group went into the studio to experiment with lighting, we go two constant lights and put see through coloured plastic sheets over the lights, here is a unedited photo of me.

and here is the edited version:

I took these photos of my models, I put a pink see through plastic sheet and a purple see through plastic sheet over the constant light.

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and refers to a technique that expresses details in content in both very bright and very dark scenes. It offers a more natural and realistic picture output even with a widened range of contrast.

Bracketing is the process of shooting the same image, shot, or scene multiple times using different camera settings resulting in different exposures. Cinematographers and photographers either bracket the camera’s aperture, ISO, or shutter speed for varying exposures.

Here are some HDR romantic photos I made:

Here are some normal HDR photos i made:

Stephen Shore, Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975, chromogenic colour print:

Technical:

The photo has been taken with a large dynamic range.

The colours are really bright and pop out, the exposure would have been high.

Has captured various shadows.

Visual:

There are signs in it.

A petrol station, cars, petrol pumps, open sky, mountains…

Leading line towards the mountain.

The “Chevron” sign is pointing down and other signs are pointing in different directions.

loads of blue, red and white.

Multiple cars which everyone used at the time due o fuel being cheap and it being shown as the way to get to everywhere.

Contextual:

By having the town appear cluttered and showing so much infrastructure within the photo, it makes the town out to be a hellhole.

We can tell which it is a old photo due to the cars being vintage and that the town heavily relies on petrol/fuel due to everyone in the photo driving and so many petrol stations cluttered in the town and the photo, we also know that in this time fuel was dirt cheap and no one knew the environmental damages it caused and there were also no electric cars.

Conceptual:

loads of blue red and white which are national American colours.

The signs are pointing in different directions out of the photo which makes it seem like there pointing to ways out of the hellhole.

The road has a leading line towards the mountains showing that if we keep on driving down it we can escape the hellhole and enter the opposite which is the mountains/wilderness that aren’t man made and have no infrastructure and are open and not cluttered.

1. How did they first meet?

They began collaborating together in 1959 after meeting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf school in 1957. Bernd originally studied painting and then typography, whereas Hilla had trained as a commercial photographer. After two years collaborating together, they married.

2. What inspired them to begin to record images of Germany’s industrial landscape?

The first area they went to was a spot in Germany was a area where thee was abandoned architecture that was going to get demolished so they wanted to preserve it by capturing it in photos, they were using a large format camera which means they weren’t able to take loads of images fast as they have to take one photo at a time meaning the whole process was slow and more carefully thought out.

3. How did the Bechers explain the concept of Typology?

Hilla Becher came up with it, she was looking at psychology and biology books, one of the people she looked at in biology was Karl Blossfeldt who published a famous book in 1928, they need to wait for the right light so a cloudy/white sky so they can clearly have the sky come out a clear white on the photo, they also photographed every drawing because they were conceptual photographers, they opposed creating images that used romanticism and wanted everything to look as real as possible, it was therefore the opposite of romanticism and was realism.

4. Which artists/ photographers inspired them to produce typology images?

The Bechers were inspired by:

1. August Sander – He took photos of people in different jobs, which influenced the Bechers’ way of organizing their photos.
2. Eugène Atget – He photographed buildings in Paris, which inspired the Bechers’ focus on architecture.
3. Walker Evans – He took clear, straightforward photos of buildings, which influenced the Bechers’ style.
4. Alfred Stieglitz – He treated photography as an art, which influenced how the Bechers approached their work.
5. New Objectivity – A movement that focused on clear, direct photography, which the Bechers followed.

Basically, these photographers and artists influenced the Bechers’ organized and detailed way of photographing buildings.

5. What is the legacy of the Bechers and their work?

The Bechers influenced artists such as Ed Ruscha and sculptor Carl Andre, perhaps their most pronounced legacy was among their students, who include Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth— now known as the “Becher School.”

Here are some of there photos: