British Expat Forum

That's a great POTW, Mike. And the Ed cropped it to portrait with great success, tempting us to click through to the original, which is better.

Mike

Now I'm lost for words...

Thanks, Mike - and yes, the Ed did a great job on croppig it. If you want to see it in greater detail, take a look here:
[url]http://[domain now obsolete]/images/%7ELWF0087.jpg[/url]

Oh yes! It looks great, thanks for this.

I've enjoyed the discussion about it - and the compliments about cropping, thank you.

But just for the hell of it, do you think the original photo is cropped as well as it could be? (Ruggie, I know you're not the type to take offence and you enjoy discussion.) Even sticking with a landscape shot, I wonder if a tighter crop might be better.

It's a while back, so I'm not certain - but I think most of the pics of the Desert Race on Freebooters are uncropped. I really was that close - lens set at around 80mm, close enough to get showered in dirt as the cars went by. Check the proportions of the images - if they're pretty well exactly 24 x 36, they're uncropped.

I've just looked at 'Chucking the dirt around'. It is cropped, but mostly just to eliminate empty sky. I think I left too much free space in front of the car, though - you can crop more than half of that away without having nowhere for the car to go. If anyone is keen to have a go, try framing it with the front coming out of the frame, but since I didn't get the whole of the rear wheels in the original slide that may not work too well.

Although the original scans were about 5300 x 3500 pixels, only a few are sharp enough to tolerate heavy cropping or big enlargements. Image fuzziness is mostly camera shake and depth of field - I was using ISO100 slide film most of the time, in mid-morning sunlight.

If the driver's face had been lit, it could have been worth cropping really tightly on the side window - you've chosen one where focus was on the middle of the car, rather than one of the ends