If we put Rossi in the upper left and go a bit wider, we show more of the track itself. Context, yes, but to me not a very appealing one. The grass in the foreground is brown, not a dark, lush green like that in front of the crowd, and the service road at the bottom of this crop is distracting rather than adding something useful.

Keeping Rossi the same size but moving the crop upward now includes the background of the village behind the circuit. To me this is MUCH better. Not only is this nicer to look at than the brown grass and the service road, but now we are seeing context that is more interesting. Sachsenring is surrounded by these lovely trees – how nice!

If we go wider still, we see more of the circuit’s surroundings and hey – Dani Pedrosa is right behind Rossi, who is not just riding around the track but trying to stay in front of another rider. More context and more story in the same image, just cropped differently.

You may notice that the terrain behind the circuit seems to fall off to the right as if the image needs to be rotated. But look at the flag poles, which are nicely vertical. If I rotated the image so that the landscape in the background looked horizontal, the flag poles would be leaning to the left and look really weird. Thus we are also showing here that the terrain around Sachsenring is not level but has its own contours and undulations.

Let’s go wider still and move the riders to the bottom right from the bottom left. This includes more of the environment in the background as well as the larger packed grandstand. Instead of Swiss flags in the crowd, now we have added that Rossi is riding toward a yellow 46 flag.

Finally, here is the un-cropped image so that you can see the starting point from which we would made decisions about how we want to use the Crop tool to tell one story or another. This image was shot with a Nikon D3X and 70-200mm f/2.8 lens at 150mm.

For comparison, this un-cropped images was shot a moment before with a D4 and 500mm f/4:

Shooting with more focal length provides more detail about the subject, but also removes the possibility of cropping the wider shot to get a greater variety of possibilities in the final image.

So don’t become obsessed with shooting really tight too much of the time. Some of the time is fine, as variety is a great feature to have in your collection of images. But shooting wider is really useful because it grants more options to crop a given image to suit your needs and personal tastes.

Photographs: ©2015 by Scott Jones / PHOTO.GP – All Rights Reserved

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Photo Editor posts are intended not as examples of what YOU should do, but as examples of the decisions the author made to achieve the results he or she desired. We hope these posts will suggest possibilities of technique and editing to help you find the look you want for your own images.