Shooting to Crop: What it Means and How To Do it Well

In this episode, the host discusses the technique of 'shooting to crop' in photography, particularly in wildlife photography. The conversation covers the importance of camera settings such as ISO, shutter speed, and aperture to ensure high-quality images that can withstand cropping. The host also emphasizes the significance of editing techniques and the role of camera gear in achieving the best results. Overall, the episode provides valuable insights for photographers looking to enhance their skills in capturing distant subjects.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:59 What is Shooting to Crop?
• 2:56 Key Settings
• 6:21 ISO and Shutter Speed
• 9:00 Inverse Focal Length Rule
• 12:51 Editing Tips

Transcript

Court (00:01)
Shooting to crop is an extraordinarily valuable skill as a photographer. And this goes for photographers of any level, any inclination, any ability or interest in editing or lack thereof. It is a really, really important skill. And today I'm going to explain what it is and how I use it to my benefit. But first, if you are enjoying this podcast, the best way you can help and support the show is to leave a review.

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Please do if you like what you're hearing here. Okay, without further ado, let's get into it. So what is shooting to crop? Well, basically it is shooting in the moment. It's taking the photograph, knowing you're going to plan on cropping that photo after the fact. So that means you're not gonna be actually ending with a photo you're taking. You know you're gonna be zooming in, cropping in when you edit this photo later. Now this typically happens

when you're photographing wildlife that is really, really distant, like almost prohibitively distant, but it happens to be a spectacular sighting that you are going to photograph no matter what, because it's an extraordinary sighting, but you probably know the photo as is, is not going to cut it. This happened to me just a few years back while photographing a moon bear in China, very, very classic example. It was so distant and I knew that I was not going to be turning this into a

classic wildlife in landscape shot where the animals are really small and the landscape is really big. Sometimes those are really beautiful, but in this case it was in a really dense forest. It was kind of scraggly. It was not in a great position. And so I knew I was going to have to shoot to crop, meaning I knew I was going to crop and therefore I set up my camera. set up all my settings in order to plan to crop. And there are some really, really key things that I'm going to go over here. This is the meat and potatoes of today's talk is

how you can tune your camera and your shooting, knowing that you need the most tip top quality possible. The other time that you might need to shoot to crop is when you just simply don't have the right lens on. Like let's say you walk out the door, whether it's on a photo trip or not, maybe it's just photographing around your neighborhood or in a small park in your city and you just didn't bring your whole kit with you and you know you needed to, you didn't bring your whole kit with you and.

there's some incredible shot and you're stuck with a 50 millimeter when you really needed a 300 millimeter. So again, shooting the crop is this idea that you know you're going to crop in after the fact. So really this all comes down to the settings you use in order to make your photo the absolute most top quality possible. That's the crux of it is just super tip top quality of your subject. So that way when you do crop the image degrades as little as possible. That's it.

Now, how you do that comes down to these settings that I'm gonna advise on right now. So the first thing, these are in, I will say in kind of no particular order, but I'm gonna start with ISO. So ISO is how your camera sensor actually responds to light. The technicality is that when you have a high ISO, and you can play around with this, you can see how it will go up from 400 to 800 to 1600, 3200, it kind of doubles with every increment.

This is essentially sending a small electric shock, believe it or not, through your camera sensor to make it more sensitive to light. Now, the thing is, is if you're shooting on auto or P for program, it's going to be giving you auto ISO each and every time. So you have to be very, very cognizant of this and you might need to switch to a setting where you can customize your ISO. In fact, I even shoot on auto ISO with manual mode. That's my preferred shooting mode

I can set my aperture, can set my shutter speed, but then the camera chooses the ISO. In this case, when I'm shooting to crop, I am going to make sure that I don't do that. I'm going to rejigger these settings and I'll tell you actually which one of those three things you don't have to worry about. But ISO is definitely a tip top concern because the higher the ISO, the more grainy the photo becomes and essentially the less quality the shot is. Now, when we're not cropping, you can get away with a pretty decently high ISO and not.

worry about it all that much. But when you know you're going to crop and I'm talking about big cropping like 50, 100 % crop, low ISO is absolutely paramount. So that means you have to look at your other settings. Now, shutter speed is also very, very important because the more telescopic, the more telephoto you use.

more just a little bit of movement of your hand is going to slightly blur a really, really distant subject. Again, when we're not cropping, we can use pretty traditional shutter speeds, you know, one over 200, one over 400 for, for sedentary wildlife. for these shoot to crop scenarios, we want to almost double that. We want to be absolutely sure the movement of your lens, the movement of your camera,

because of your own hand movement is almost non-existent. You need to freeze the motion as much as humanly possible. Now the third part of this equation is aperture. The great thing here is that you don't have to have a big F number. You don't have to have a deep depth of field. In fact, it's sort of the opposite. You want that low F number, meaning a very big aperture in order to let in as much light to hedge your bets with the fast shutter speed and with the low ISO.

So oftentimes if you want to get everything in focus in the frame, you would need like say an F8 or F11. In this case, go down to the lowest possible number because when you crop, everything's gonna be in focus in that focal point because aperture in depth of field is really a ratio or a proportion of your frame. So an F4 and F5.6, it's totally okay and it's actually advised because you really, really need to prioritize for getting that fast shutter speed.

you faster than you would normally think, and you need to photograph at a low ISO. Now, what is low ISO and what is a fast shutter speed? Well, to me, the best ISO you could possibly hope for is going to be ISO 100. Now that is low. You're going to see pretty quickly that that does not let in a lot of light. Every time you double your ISO going from 100 to 200, you let in twice as much light. So if the camera is suggesting, let's say you, you

tap the shutter and your automatic mode or your manual plus auto ISO is suggesting an ISO and it says maybe, you know, I would shoot this shot at 400. I'm talking about the camera here. The camera is the I The camera is shooting at 400. If you wish to go down to 100, that is only 25 % of the original light because you lose half the light when you cut down from 400 to 200 and then you lose half the light going from 200 to 100. So it's

It really, really kind of hobbles you in a little bit of a way, but it is really paramount when you're shooting the crop. So what do we do about this? Well, you know, I'm not the biggest fan in the world of tripods, but this is one of those cases where if you have one with you or if you're considering bringing one when shooting to crop, a tripod is absolutely huge because you can stabilize your camera to not worry about that shutter speed. Whereas if you're a hand holding a shot and let's say an animal is a, you know,

400 yards away you're photographing wolves in Yellowstone You're photographing cheetahs on the savannas of Africa and they just happen to be very very distant You might need to shoot at 1 over 600th of a shutter speed 1 over 800 that can be pretty limiting So when you combine that with a low ISO, it can get really really tough Remember aperture not as big of a concern here so you can let in light by dialing that F number as low as possible however

You need to have that fast shutter speed and you need to have a low ISO. Enter the tripod. So going back just a second, I talked about, you know, what is a fast shutter speed. And this is really, really subjective. I have entire episodes on nothing but setting your shutter speed for the wildlife movement, meaning, you know, what shutter speed do you use if it's a sedentary polar bear in Churchill, maybe like one over three 20, what if that polar bear is rolling around one over 600?

What if that polar bear is galloping and trotting across the tundra? You might be at one over 1250. So the key thing here is that you really need to think about what the minimum is for the action and then increase it maybe even a little bit more so. So a good rule of thumb is called the inverse focal length rule. And what that means is that if you're shooting with a 300 millimeter,

the rule says that you should shoot no slower than 1 300th of a second. Now, again, in other episodes I've talked at length about this and why that no longer really applies because of the image stabilizers in a lot of our lenses. However, as a general rule on top of that, if I'm shooting to crop, knowing that I'm gonna be really zeroing in on that subject, I'm probably gonna double that.

So if I'm shooting with a 300 millimeter lens, I'm probably going to be shooting at least one of her 600.

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Okay, getting back to today's episode. Big question is, okay, you're shooting the crop, you get all these settings in there, how much do you crop? Well, again, very, very subjective. But generally when I'm talking about this idea in general, where I'm really prioritizing, re-prioritizing my camera settings because I know I'm gonna crop, it's because I'm gonna crop a lot. ⁓ I generally think it's possible with some of the newer cameras and lenses, and we'll get to gear in a second, but I think it's possible to crop 75 %

100%, meaning you're zooming in almost double what your focal length would be. So this is a really powerful tool. If you're shooting in a 400 millimeter and you need double that, that's what cropping can do, maybe even more so. So it is very, very subjective, but in general, my advice is obviously crop as little as you need, but we are setting you up for maximum crop. So you can, you can do quite a bit. And then that's where the next step comes in, which is really the editing part of the equation. So.

Editing, have to be judicious. You have to be soft touch with your editing because your image can start to look really, really fake very quickly if you start to over edit a highly cropped photo. But nevertheless, it is an integral part of my shoot to crop formula. So I do often inject a little bit of sharpness. I do often inject a little bit of D noise in my shots. So you can sharpen just selectively using the brush tool. You might brush over the face and the eyes.

You might denoise the scene and then pull back some of that artificial sharpening that it injects. But ultimately I do sharpen my image. I do denoise it because as you get into the shot, again, going back to the ISO, you know, I said ISO 100 is ideal, but frankly we're probably shooting at 200, we're probably shooting at 400. The message there was not so much that 100 is the only acceptable ISO. It's that you need to set it as low as humanly possible.

So yes, I do shoot to crop and I do use higher ISOs and that's where Denoise comes in. I use the Photoshop Denoise, which is part of the Lightroom or Adobe Camera RAW bundle. It's just right in the program itself, but I have used and have had Topaz Denoise in the past and it is a great program. It's just as good, if not better than Photoshop. The only reason I'm not using it actively now is that Lightroom has really improved their Denoise and now I don't have to go to an outside third party program.

to do one part of the editing only to re-import it into Lightroom Adobe Camera RAW to do the rest. I do all that process within Lightroom or Adobe Camera RAW. Okay, the final thing is camera gear. This should not be skipped or missed because it is very important. This can be a game changer. If you're finding that you are shooting to crop often and you're thinking about upgrading camera gear, you haven't upgraded in five or 10 years,

Whether that's lenses or cameras or maybe you're shooting on a crop frame and you wish to go to a full frame sensor. This is really, really important. Full frame sensors are going to allow you to crop in so much more. Not only do they have generally just significantly more megapixels, but the bigger sensor gives you better quality so you can crop further. So one of the quick hacks that will cost you a little bit and it is also relearning perhaps a new camera system, but is getting a full frame camera.

this is massive if you are shooting to crop a lot. Let's say you start to adopt this practice and you use it a lot, a full frame camera is going to be your best friend. And then the other thing, which is just something that goes with all quality photography is a really high quality lens. If you're shooting with a better lens, you're going to be able to crop more because that image integrity is held up further and further as you crop in more and more.

So there you go. That is a relatively quick one today, but it's a really important technique of shooting to crop. ⁓ You know, it's basically the way of preserving the image to highest quality. So when you do crop, it loses as little as possible of the image integrity or really sharpness and quality of the image. So the best things to do to ensure a tip top image to start off with that you can crop in a lot is to make sure you have a fast shutter speed, a little bit faster than normal.

and a low, low ISO. Do not worry about aperture. That's the silver lining here is you can throw that out the window and shoot at the smallest F number, AKA biggest aperture possible. That's gonna allow you to get that faster shutter speed, allow you to get the lower ISO, and then seriously consider putting your camera on a tripod or just stabilizing it in some way. Sometimes I will put my camera on a handrail, a boardwalk, maybe even on a rock or on the ground.

just to get some more stability, because that's gonna allow me to shoot slower because it removes that hand movement out of the equation, which can be very, very important when you're looking at an animal, a wildlife, a subject, deep, deep into the distance. Remember, don't crop too much, but the whole thing here is setting you up to crop a lot. So I always say crop as little as possible, but this is setting you up to crop up to possibly 100%. And dare I say I've even gone further than that before.

Yes, ⁓ they are small images. They're just a couple of megabytes a piece. But nevertheless, for really rare behaviors or really magnificent things caught on camera that you just have to have in your final trip album or in your portfolio or on your website, this is an extraordinary tool and all starts with shooting the crop. It all starts with these settings in camera as you're shooting to give you the highest ability to manipulate the image further when you're editing and post.

Once again, thank you so much for joining in remember the best way you can support this podcast is to leave a review on the podcast platform of choice. And the second best way or another way perhaps is just to share with a friend, help get the word out there, get more people tuning into this because I love talking. I love folks listening. I love teaching and here to help you further. So stay tuned for many more episodes to come. Thanks so much.