Micro Cropping Science
The above photo began as a study of color and also a rare foray of this photographer into the world of child photography. The display of the coffee house foods and colorful wrappings contrasted neatly with the child’s blonde hair and green dress, and the light around the area was brightly lit enough to make an image grab fruitful.
The resultant image had a shutter freeze blur that appears artistic to some people and could look very attractive in a framed portrait. I was switching between museum and micro settings because I wanted to see how much flash the micro setting generated at 5X digital intensity into the field. the varying image files to choose from each had benefits and drawbacks. Experience with the finished cropped and reduced file result helped me choose the right one.
I tend to avoid blurs as they do not suit my compositional style. I knew from experience that reducing the size attribute of a twelve megapixel frame photo would drive resolution up. Thus, for a focused picture, I continued scale shrinking down until definition in the child’s hair and juice box were at a premium. The colors in the grocery labels matched her dress.
The real surprise of this photo came in the cropping decisions. As I edited the image, I realized a few micro shot markets would apply. Dining, shopping, children, kids, nutrition, coffeehouse and children’s fashion would have been good categories for this shot. I knew from experience that food displays are very central to topical microsites concerning diet, nutrition, and kids.
The colorful labels of foods and green colors especially resonate brightly on the web screen. The fashion element was the child’s dress, enhanced by the echo of the green colors of the food labels. Back to school, nursery school age, toddler, childcare, and family are also good tags. The light made a soothing glow that some webmasters might want to use, and others would not, depending on the tone of their text articles.
Micro stock photographers working with children might do well to use this shot as  for a photo like this. Changing dresses on the child and rearranging the grocery items for resonating food label colors for impact might also be a strategic way to go. For a small boy child, tennis shoe colors and t-shirt or baseball cap colors could work as color accessories too.
At the very small end of the cropping decision tree, I noticed two distinct pictures beginning to emerge. The snapshot flat rectangle dimensions made a cropping for square shape necessary. but the right hand end cropped made the child the focus of the shot and its main subject, minimizing the grocery colors and environment.
But cropping minutely on either side of the shot created a polarity of the green colors that created a relationship between the grocery shelf colors and the child’s stance. This drew the viewer’s interest to the action in the photo (and the colors) without relinquishing the topicality of all the other keywords. The other crop version of the same file would feature the child as main central composition subject.
