Marco on the grid for Race 1 at Laguna Seca, 2014. He would win this race and showed some intense concentration on the grid.

I chose this photo to share here because it’s an example of how useful an aggressive crop can be.

As ever, you can click on the image above to see a larger version.

The unprocessed RAW file is here:

The RAW file has several problems. There are many solutions defined by combinations of edits, depending on what story you want to tell.

What I’m after with this image is the look in Marco’s eyes. So I use several editing tools to focus the viewer’s attention on his eyes.

First is the crop. You can see how I cropped so that Marco’s eyes are off center, as close to the Rule of Thirds as possible without cropping out the right side tear off tab. I might have cropped that item out to move the subject’s eyes a bit farther to the left, but I like that detail so decided to leave it in because it frames the eyes nicely with the red splashes of color.

After increasing the brightness levels to reveal the eyes themselves, I found that the figure in the back ground was distracting. In the RAW file you might wonder what he’s doing with his finger, wiping his nose or what? That is a distraction. So I added a bit more vignette than usual to make his recede into the background.

In the final version the background figure is just a suggestion of things going on around Marco that he is blocking out as he concentrates on thoughts of the race ahead.

The other detail I decided to crop out is the action of Marco’s fingers as he fastens his chin strap. At first I liked including this detail, but then decided that what I wanted people to watch was only Marco’s eyes and their look of concentration.

You might have made a different decision. But this is the type of editorial choice one makes when deciding how to crop an image. What will you include and what will you remove in order to tell the story YOU want to tell with your photography?

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.

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