I’ve lectured and taught photography to thousands of people over the past decade with over 250 workshops and seminars around the world and often people tell me, or I see it when they are shooting while “chimping” with their LCD screen, how they leave room for cropping their images to make the photo fit a matte and/or picture frame.  Obviously this is a problem more inherent to the United States, not for Europe.

My first thought is why? My second thought is you obviously have never worked with a photo editor for publication. My last thought is you probably bought your camera based on mega-pixel hype, or on the Jones’s standard, I have more mega-pixels than you.

Let’s look at the why part first. We’re a society that tends to be programmed as we grow up in life. Most of use grew up with (in inches) 11×14′s, 8×10′s, 5×7′s and the 3 1/2 x 5′s, the latter made famous by the Noritsu one-hour mini-lab explosion of the 1980′s. Though the 3 1/2×5′s graduated to 4×6′s, our problems with mandatory societal-cropping (think frames, mattes and photo albums) still didn’t end with our 35mm format cameras. Part of the non-ending I base on what I like to call, “the framing industry conspiracy theory” to sell us mattes with our frames. And to ground my theory, let’s look how it all developed, no pun intended, or the second part of obviously you’ve never worked with photo editors or editors before. [Read more...]