This post is part of a series from Rick Braveheart. our wonderful resident photographer. Please see more of his work here.

The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”
~ Henry David Thoreau (American Poet & Philosopher, 1817-1862)

Western North Carolina is home to countless landscape settings filled with sweeping mountain vistas that stretch almost endlessly across the horizon. In this, my 14th and final blog from Buncombe County, it seems the ideal place to discuss a simple technique for adding impact to a photograph which, if you’ve never tried it is far easier than you might think.

Every digital or film camera records images in a rectangular (or sometimes square) shape. It’s the camera itself which determines the relative height and width of the image that’s recorded on the memory card or film. Most often, what captures your attention and what you want to photograph are rarely of the same dimensions as what the camera will record.

Two weeks ago I stood looking across a fog-filled valley preparing to make the photograph shown at the top of this blog. I’d been attracted to the orange color reflected in the fog from a setting sun, and the mountain ranges that rose from within that fog. I had almost no awareness of the sky directly above or valley directly below. With a zoom lens it was easy to focus the “width” of the image so it included that wide span of mountains. Because the camera controls the overall rectangular shape however, it also captured larger sections of the sky and valley than I was looking at and didn’t want included in the image. A photograph printed directly from what the camera recorded would not have matched the extremely wide but somewhat short picture that my eyes had seen and caught my attention.

Cropping is the process of trimming or removing unwanted areas from an image that you don’t want included in the final photograph. Cropping a digital image can easily be done using Photoshop, Picasa or programs that are sometimes included with digital cameras. Many kiosks at photo processing stores also offer a cropping feature in which you can outline on the screen the area of the image you want removed from the photograph. Some people avoid cropping because it takes time. Some others avoid it because the final photograph may not fit into a standard size photo frame or photo book. As you can see in these two examples though, cropping can produce dramatic images by removing unwanted elements in a photograph.