the winter grumpies (before and after)

I generally don't do a lot of cropping to my photos.  I've always been a "compose with the camera" kind of guy, and I find that the best compositions come through that process.  That said, there are always exceptions and this photograph was one of them.  All rules are meant to be broken, as they say.

Here's the original:



When I first shot this, my initial thought was that I liked the combination of people, both inside and outside.  The problem is that red pole in the middle of the frame, which I find distracting and just a little too centered.  So that's when I tried various crops, and settled on the square crop above focusing solely on the older gentleman on the street.  I then converted it to black and white and added a touch of film grain.

The downside is that I can't print this one very large.  With the crop, it went from a 12mp image to about 3 or 4mp.  I'd guess 8 x 8 is as large as this could print at reasonable quality.

Nikon D90 with 55-200mm (at 200mm), 1/100sec at f8, ISO200.