The Cut Before the Picture
A painter adds. A photographer can only choose an edge.
Every photograph makes two statements: what is included, and what is excluded.
- dins de camp: inside the frame, in the field of view.
- fora de camp: outside the frame.
Off-frame space still shapes the image. Noël Burch (Theory of Film Practice, 1969) divided it into six segments:
- Four spaces beyond the four edges
- One space behind the camera
- One space behind the set or horizon
Photography inherits all six.
Inherited Proportions and Cropping
Standard 35 mm still film measures 24 × 36 mm. It gives an area of 864 square millimetres.
Cropping it to a 24 × 24 square leaves 576 square millimetres. You discard one-third of the negative and its resolution.
Many consumer viewfinders showed only 92 to 95 per cent of the captured scene. Elements outside your viewfinder still reached the film.
Common pitfall: treating framing and cropping as identical. Framing selects what the lens gathers. Cropping merely discards captured data, degrading your final Picture quality.