The use of the word ‘crop’ in photography was purposely borrowed and adapted from agriculture.

The Old English word cropp, meant the head of a plant. By extension it came to mean the harvest.

By the 16th and 17th centuries, ‘crop’ was also used for cutting hair, whether people or animals. Even today a person might say to the barber ‘Don’t crop it.’

Photographers and printers borrowed the word right from the earliest days of photography to mean a way to improve the composition or to focus attention on the subject.

And then some photographers began to get very opinionated, stating flatly that if you didn’t get the composition right in the camera you were less of a photographer.

Other photographers would say the opposite, that there was every reason to crop when the scene could be improved by doing it..

The ones who suffered were the ones who would read a pronouncement in print and carried the message on their backs, fearing to crop even when everything told them it was a good idea.

One has to be careful of what one takes in almost against one’s will of the ‘must not do’ or ‘must do’ rules in this world.

The Crop

This is a crop of about 75% of the linear area of the original shot, followed by the full frame.

Why I Cropped The Photo

If I had been able to get closer without intruding into the social space, I would have. Now, looking at the cropped version and the full frame, the tension seems quite different in the two versions. In the cropped version I am right there, feeling the relationship of sitters and artist.

In the full frame version I can feel the public area, the passers-by and the isolation of sitting still. The scene is almost chillier, the temperature less warm.

Why I Took The Photo

This is in Leicester Square in London.

People under the microscope display body positions and expressions that I find interesting. And then what the relationship between these people? It is not obvious.

Why have they decided to have their caricatures drawn, and what are they hoping for beyond the technical skill of the street artist?

It is kind of brave to sit because, like anyone doing this, they are making themselves immobile under the gaze of every passer-by. Some people don’t care two hoots who is looking, and others look as though they are being pricked with a thousand needles.

And here’s a thing – once the sitters are sitting, they can draw themselves in to a close environment and feel that the world is just the three of them, inside the little cocoon they have made.

Of course that too will vary with different people, but I think if I had the technical skill to be an artist in Leicester Square, I would use any little trick – like arranging an easel and a board so that my sitters could feel they were inside a protected space.

I wonder how much difference that would make to the takings?

Camera Stuff

Shot with a Ricoh GR III at ISO 1600, f4.5, 1/1000th of a second. The Ricoh has a fixed 28mm lens, so getting a close shot would mean getting very close physically. Had I had a camera with a longer focal length lens then I could have captured the scene more closely.

But, that’s actually yes, and no. I could have captured a scene, but not the same scene exactly.

Short focal length distances stretch distance and long focal length lenses compress distance.

That is because for a given scene a longer lens is positioned further back, And the increase in distance from camera to subject compresses distance, meaning it changes the relative size of near and far objects.

I must do a post showing this.

So with the need to get close, it meant that to begin with I couldn’t work with a 28mm lens. Then after a while I started to get the hang of what it was asking for. Advice for anyone is to choose a lens and find out how it draws.

In a word, short focal lengths are more intimate in that they draw you into the scene – if you can get close enough.

Somehow all the disparate elements have come together to make a tableau – a dramatic arrangement of people such as a group of costumed actors posing silently on stage, or a piece of visual art, or a chance coming together of people who have no idea of the part they play in the tableau or that there is a tableau at all.

Fuji X100F – 1/60th at f2 and ISO 800.

Claude Monet
1840-1926
Water-Lilies
1917
.Oil on canvas
On loan from a private collection

First I was interested in the woman in the fine costume taking a photo of the painting, with herself in the photo. Will she send it to friends to say she was there? Will she sit around with friends and show it to them when she gets back home? Who knows?

For a long time I didn’t see that Monet’s water lily paintings are wonderful: It took me a long while to get past feeling that I saw them before I saw them – meaning that I know what water lilies are, and so the subject matter is a bit simple and obvious.

But then when I stopped, I saw that the leaves of these water lilies don’t look like any I have seen in actuality. They reward the act of looking at them deeply.

If I spend time and look, then I see that the painting is helpful to look at, and to keep looking at.

I say ‘helpful’ because we all need help to get in touch with even a small part of the feeling that is outside the rush of life.

I see so many people in the National Gallery who don’t give more than a moment’s attention any of the paintings. Often they photograph them with their phones and are gone in a trice. I wonder why they go to the galleries at all.

What is the key to unlock their interest?

What surprised me about this painting in the National Gallery is that I have come to expect a certain kind brush mark from Cezanne in his later paintings. This, however, is a more ‘traditional’ mixing of direction to make the composition.

In this painting it appears as though the idea or the creative imposition of certain kinds of brush marks designed to make a point, has not yet developed.

I didn’t know, however, whether this held true because I didn’t know where the painting fitted within the chronologically to either uphold or counter this narrative.

And I learned that 1876, when he painted this, was right before he developed his signature brushwork of uniform marks that are known art-historically as the ‘constructive stroke’ or tache.

So now I know.

I have linked these two images to the image file. So if you click on them you can see them bigger.