Jedi by Knight

As a scrapbooker, cropping my photos comes naturally to me.  “Cropping” is actually a frequently used slang term for the act of scrapbooking, as in “I spent my Saturday at a crop,” meaning a get-together for scrapbooking (not possible right now ☹).

I edit nearly all my photos, either simply with Google Photos or with Forever Historian, a photo editing software intended for scrapbookers.  When you have limited space in a scrapbook, cropping helps you focus on essentials for the sake of aesthetics, as well as fit more photos on a page.

On our trip to Europe, we took a lot of bus tours, which don’t give you a lot of time to frame the perfect shot.  Luckily, that’s where cropping comes in!

Typical bus photo.

A perfectly decent photo of the Vatican.

This one goes from a typical “yeah, I took this out a bus window” photo to a perfectly decent shot St. Peter’s Basilica.  I personally think square photos are underrated and use them a lot.

On Skellig Michael in Ireland, sometime the cliffs made it impossible to get exactly the shot I would have liked, and I had an older camera with me because I didn’t want to chance my phone getting wet on the boat ride.  I have cropped nearly every picture I took there.

The original vertical.

Cropped to horizontal.

This one even went from vertical to horizontal.  I was able to get rid of some unnecessary rocks and waves and zoom in on the adorable puffins.  It may also have been a better fit for the layout of my scrapbooking page.  I probably could have cropped even further to focus on just one or two puffins, but I had to consider the resolution of the photo, too.

You can find more cropping at the original Lens-Artist challenge.