headshots/close portraits question cropping the head

dean messenger

dean messenger

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something that puzzles me is generally in photography i see a lot of comments on shots about cropping and making sure your subject is all in the frame ( things like hands or elbows missing, feet or tops of ears / wing tips on birds and animals), that whole kind of thing.
yet in portrait photography i do seem to notice that alot of shots crop off the top of the head.
now i appreciate the need to that sometimes you want to get very up close but i find it strange that alot of portrait shots do this and that its not even what you would call consistent in where the crop takes place ( just above the eyebrows to the tip of the top of the head, and that it seems perfectly acceptable.
Its not like a close up face shot either but portraits taken from slightly further back showing from the neck or even shoulders up.

just look at google images here when searching portraits and the first row all but one is missing some part of the top of the head and it continues all the way down the page
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=p...&sa=X&ei=3stJVbDOOcTiavP0gNAC&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ

in most other forms of photography this would seem to be unacceptable ( to tight a crop ) so it got me wondering about other peoples thoughts on it. to crop or not to crop or is it purely down to the style of shot your looking for?
can only guess its partly down to rule of thirds as by cropping when in close it puts the eyes on the upper third drawing you more into the image.
 
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I like a good head crop... but I think it needs to be a conscious and compositional (is that a word??) crop... I think he helps to really focus on the important parts of the picture sometimes. Sure, there are so-called rules about cropping, but think of them as more of a guideline. If you know the rules, it's more than ok to break them.

Just throwing this out there - this was head cropped - but it helps to draw the attention to where I wanted it. The full shot was sort of boring and didn't have as much impact (I thought, anyway).
[url=https://flic.kr/p/s8ERvY]You know it's all about that foot, bout that foot by Beth Botterill, on Flickr[/URL]

I think body parts are a slightly different ballgame - someone on here once told me never to chop between the knees and the feet, something I've always tried to keep to. But that's just me - you see plenty of fab images that have done just that. But I think partial fingers and toes just don't work.

Of course, this is just my way of thinking...
 
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yep i think the thread title is slighly misleading as there seems to be a difference between headshots and portraits so i guess im more referring to headshots. just watshicn a youtube vid from a a top pro headshot tog who always shoots in landscape mode ( he shoots alot of actors and acrtresses ) and says that we naturally see in landscape and that we see these people on a tv screen in landscape , plus he likes to have negative space for the eyes to look in to. he shoots pretty much 99.9% head cropped . becasue he says" the top of the head isnt important. you know whats up there !) and prefers to have the shoulders showing and eyes above the centre line.
people shooting is something ive done very little of and looking at what i have done ( the kids, family a few friends) it does seem that of all the shots i have the ones with that tigher head chopped crop do seem to have a little more impact.
i guess its having to get used to adjusting the frame having shot much more wildlife and pets where i always make sure that ears, feet, tails , wings etc are all in the shot. something i will need to experiment with a little more next time i do a person shot
 
dean messenger said:
something that puzzles me is generally in photography i see a lot of comments on shots about cropping and making sure your subject is all in the frame ( things like hands or elbows missing, feet or tops of ears / wing tips on birds and animals), that whole kind of thing.
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A lot of composition criticism is very conservative, particularly with cropping the tops of heads. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't but as with any other compositional rule sticking rigidly to either not cropping or always cropping through the head in a portrait misses the point of getting the best from the situation in front of you. Done well, tight cropping really draws you in close to the subject - the infant above is a classic example of this.

In an otherwise pretty good guide to composition this blog repeatedly gets all up-tight about Leibovitz who is always cropping limbs against the conventional approach, without ever really getting into why it seems to work and why it's not always a problem.
 
dean messenger said:
yep i think the thread title is slighly misleading as there seems to be a difference between headshots and portraits so i guess im more referring to headshots. just watshicn a youtube vid from a a top pro headshot tog who always shoots in landscape mode ( he shoots alot of actors and acrtresses ) and says that we naturally see in landscape and that we see these people on a tv screen in landscape , plus he likes to have negative space for the eyes to look in to. he shoots pretty much 99.9% head cropped . becasue he says" the top of the head isnt important. you know whats up there !) and prefers to have the shoulders showing and eyes above the centre line.
people shooting is something ive done very little of and looking at what i have done ( the kids, family a few friends) it does seem that of all the shots i have the ones with that tigher head chopped crop do seem to have a little more impact.
i guess its having to get used to adjusting the frame having shot much more wildlife and pets where i always make sure that ears, feet, tails , wings etc are all in the shot. something i will need to experiment with a little more next time i do a person shot
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Apologies for the misinterpretation. :)
 
not the best examples by far. just a shot of my stepdaughter i took recently. so you have the original, cropped and a cropped mono version. ignoring the flaws of my headshot itself does the crop work better?

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I would venture to suggest these things come and go with fashions and at the present time, it is right in vogue.

Go back 100 years and the shot would have been ditched. (OK so someone will now prove me wrong and if so apologies).

I think the shape of screen that we all stare at these days has a lot to do with it, plus some photographers, once they reach a certain level of notoriety, will almost deliberately drive their own style against convention to be different and stand out.

Look also at the current vogue for ICM.

Not a huge fan of the current portrait crop style personally, but if thats what people 'want', why be Canute?

(Until the next big style thing comes along and I haven't invented that yet......)
 
Do whatever has the most impact for the particular shot or says what you want to say. Know the "rules", but don't be a slave to them.
 
dean messenger said:
i guess its having to get used to adjusting the frame having shot much more wildlife and pets where i always make sure that ears, feet, tails , wings etc are all in the shot. something i will need to experiment with a little more next time i do a person shot
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Lorks, it took me ages to get comfortable with cropping heads. The point is that someone's eyes are halfway down their head, and that the top half of the head isn't all that interesting.

Now I've managed to make the mental leap I think that many pet and wildlife shots could be made more interesting by relaxing and cropping a bit, too. (Note that I didn't say improved - the wildlife genre has long established standards for what makes a 'good' shot).
 
I think you could have cropped them even further down the forehead to maybe just above the eyebrows.

Sometimes cropping the head looks right, sometimes it doesn't :)
 
When the kids were small we had some portraits done by a well know photograph chain. When we had the first ones done of our eldest we didn't buy our favourite shot because it was ruined because they'd got all of him in except for chopping off part of one foot. Every time we went afterwards I said don't chop toes of but they still managed it. Grrrrr.

I also learnt from a YouTube video 'If you have knees, you must have feet' which is something I try to stick to.

I was always of the opinion of not chopping heads but seeing the images above by Dean and Bethy I can see how my eye is drawn more to the face so have now changed my mind (y)
 
As with all artistic disciplines, rules are there to be broken. It's great to learn about classical and traditional composition rules, but to really grow as a photographer it's also important to experiment and find out what you yourself find aesthetically pleasing, and also find out what your target market expects (if you are planning to make money from it... otherwise, it's all about what you personally like looking at!).

The important thing is to get to the stage where you are making a conscious creative decision and understand why you are composing the image in a certain way. Close-cropped portraits, for example, can have an intimacy and dynamic that feels very different from one where there is space around the head.

Have you heard of Sue Bryce? She is a very successful portrait photographer who gets a lot of criticism for the things she does (or doesn't do) from people who believe that there are 'right' and 'wrong' ways to take a portrait. She is admittedly not the most technically minded photographer; what she is great at is firstly being hard-headed about business, but secondly and most importantly she has thought hard and been clever about producing images her clients consistently love and spend money on. What I like most about her is that she has always done her own thing and ignored the dissenting voices. Her work isn't groundbreaking, but it has its own style and isn't afraid to break rules. Ultimately, she is running a very profitable business and doing photography every day, whilst countless people who obsess over what is 'correct' sit at home and type away whilst their camera gathers dust.

Here's a little article by her you may find interesting; it's a short posing guide, with 5 quick compositions. If you find this useful, her videos on CreativeLive are also well worth watching. Guides like this are really great, because if you hook up with a few models and consciously practice getting 5 compositions out of one pose, soon it becomes second nature and you quickly learn what compositions work for you and are most pleasing to your eye.

http://www.inbedwithsue.com/2013/06/27/1-2-3-4-5/
 
Great subject for a thread, Dean (y)

When I first started photographing people (as opposed to bugs), I never EVER cropped into the head. I always felt it was a rule not to be broken. Then, a good friend of mine kept saying 'crop tighter' and I thought he was just trying to wind my OCD up. Until I started to crop closer and really saw how it could change the dramatic nature of a portrait.

Having said that, I do think I have been influenced heavily by my choice of display medium - a widescreen monitor. I hardly ever print my images and when I do, it's always a landscape orientation for hanging or display purposes.Portraits in portrait orientation just don't do same for me as in landscape orientation.

There in lies the dilemma (for me). Everyone knows eyes look way better above the center of an image (if the subject is vertical). If you are at a wide(ish) angle or the subject is small in the frame, then that's easy. If you are close (as my style usually is) then it is impossible to achieve without cropping into the head. I've included two images below to highlight my point, if I may.

In this first one, as I was at 420mm but Cassie was small in the frame, there was no need to crop into the head and the image looks great as a landscape portrait. It has a place in my Cassidy album and it's a great memory pic.


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Then Cassidy came closer to me and filled the frame more. I cropped into her head to achieve a more dramatic portrait while still retaining lovely background detail and enough of her outfit to jog the memory of where we were and what we were doing. This image appeals to me WAY more than the first.


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If I was going to hang one of these on my wall, it would be the closer crop every time, chopped head and all.

Another prime example is in my B&W Cassidy thread where I've posted the SOOC shot and much closer crop as the submitted image.

Anyway, I won't detract from your original discussion by posting loads of my own examples, but hopefully this will illustrate my way of thinking on the subject.
 
does seem to be one of the exceptions to the rule. if i did the same with a squirrels ears or the top of the eiffel tower it would be a no no ( unless i was clearly going for some extreme close up or abstract ) but does seem that the crop seems to work much better in many cases for head/ portrait/ facial shots ( pretty much anything thats shoulders up ). i think when you start going below the shoulders then the parameters of the image most likely change somewhat. hence why the above two examples work as they are
 
With a head shot the image is naturally cropped at the bottom, usually just below the shoulders.
To me, if the top of the head isn't cropped the image can look unbalanced. A light crop at the top can rectify that by giving the image some sort of symmetry.
 
I saw it, read about it and notice that some Wedding photographers now do it ........ I think that when my daughter looked at a few web sites with examples it put her off ...... but I suppose it depends on the bride and groom
 
dean messenger said:
does seem to be one of the exceptions to the rule. if i did the same with a squirrels ears or the top of the eiffel tower it would be a no no
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I think it can work with animals. This isn't a great shot by any stretch - I don't really do cats - but I think the top & bottom framing works here. A bit more space on the right might have been nice, though.

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Portraits in landscape, now there's something to try. I've done it the other way around (landscapes in portrait) which seems to work well in the right circumstances. And of course portraits in landscape when there's more than one person. @gbmphoto that second shot is really nice, I'm surprised you haven't got it on your wall already if she's your daughter
 
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It's a good question. I do smile a bit when crit delivers the "oh, and you chopped their hand/leg/arm/foot/head off therefore its rubbish". It has to be down to the image itself. There is no 'rule' that says every body part has to be completely in frame. If you can't use your imagination to realise what is going on then more fool you. Sometimes it suits, sometimes it doesn't. There are many fashion shots new and old with limbs/hands/legs feet etc cut off - just peruse the fashion chains imagery in their stores. There are many greats who have done it also, regularly. Google Rankin and look at his images, hands, elbows, heads etc regularly chopped off. Does it detract from the image? Not one jot! Why? Because he's a brilliant artist. Love him or hate him. David Bailey? Same. Where did this 'rule' come from? Classic oil paintings maybe? Not sure but it sucks!

The skill as a photographer is in knowing when it works and when it doesn't. It isn't always about 1/3rds etc its about the feel of the shot. What you're trying to achieve.
 
juggler said:
I think it can work with animals. This isn't a great shot by any stretch - I don't really do cats - but I think the top & bottom framing works here. A bit more space on the right might have been nice, though.

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yeah i think if you shooting animals faces ( so essentially the animal equivalent of a head shot) then you can get away with it a little more.
 
Raptor Mike said:
Portraits in landscape, now there's something to try. I've done it the other way around (landscapes in portrait) which seems to work well in the right circumstances. And of course portraits in landscape when there's more than one person. @gbmphoto that second shot is really nice, I'm surprised you haven't got it on your wall already if she's your daughter
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I tend to do most of my portraits in landscape... I think they have a nicer feel to them. They're well received too it seems by my clients.
 
Rich_Ellis said:
It's a good question. I do smile a bit when crit delivers the "oh, and you chopped their hand/leg/arm/foot/head off therefore its rubbish". It has to be down to the image itself. There is no 'rule' that says every body part has to be completely in frame. If you can't use your imagination to realise what is going on then more fool you. Sometimes it suits, sometimes it doesn't. There are many fashion shots new and old with limbs/hands/legs feet etc cut off - just peruse the fashion chains imagery in their stores. There are many greats who have done it also, regularly. Google Rankin and look at his images, hands, elbows, heads etc regularly chopped off. Does it detract from the image? Not one jot! Why? Because he's a brilliant artist. Love him or hate him. David Bailey? Same. Where did this 'rule' come from? Classic oil paintings maybe? Not sure but it sucks!

The skill as a photographer is in knowing when it works and when it doesn't. It isn't always about 1/3rds etc its about the feel of the shot. What you're trying to achieve.
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Surely though in terms of Fashion photography its about the clothes and not the person so arms, legs etc bits that dont necessarily have the clothing in them are kind of unimportant.
headshots/ portraits are about the person where you are hopefully trying to catch an image on a personal even intimate level.
quick look at the example of Rankin and i would certainly categorize most of the shots as mainly portrait with many being closeup headshots falling into the cropped head or shoulders and above. sure theres a big cross over from fashion into portrait ( or vice versa ) but i think the premise behind the two are rather different in what the image is portraying.
 
Rich_Ellis said:
There is no 'rule' that says every body part has to be completely in frame. If you can't use your imagination to realise what is going on then more fool you. Sometimes it suits, sometimes it doesn't. There are many fashion shots new and old with limbs/hands/legs feet etc cut off - just peruse the fashion chains imagery in their stores.
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However.. there are guidelines for the location of any chop which are rarely broken, e.g. just above the elbow, not below.
 
dean messenger said:
Surely though in terms of Fashion photography its about the clothes and not the person so arms, legs etc bits that dont necessarily have the clothing in them are kind of unimportant.
headshots/ portraits are about the person where you are hopefully trying to catch an image on a personal even intimate level.
quick look at the example of Rankin and i would certainly categorize most of the shots as mainly portrait with many being closeup headshots falling into the cropped head or shoulders and above. sure theres a big cross over from fashion into portrait ( or vice versa ) but i think the premise behind the two are rather different in what the image is portraying.
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Yeah I guess so but the line is a thin one and I'm not sure there is that much difference between the two. If the shot just looked 'wrong' then it wouldn't work at its job. Both try to capture a 'spirit', an emotion. Rankin does head and shoulders but hands and arms and elbows etc are easily cropped off or in half by him and many, many others.

juggler said:
However.. there are guidelines for the location of any chop which are rarely broken, e.g. just above the elbow, not below.
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I agree, most of the time, but in this for example (warning NSFW) it works with a crop just below the knee and is a Rankin shot. http://www.iainclaridge.co.uk/blog/32620 however I accept there are some hard ones to make work. It's all this, 'it doesn't work cos of the floating hand' and 'shame about the missing elbow' kinda stuff that's silly...and wrong. If it works, it works, if it doesn't, it's usually cos it's just an emotionless nothing shot and nothing to do with the cropping. It therefore is a red herring and means loadsa people spend time worrying about arms and legs and not enough on the subject and what they're trying to capture. Then they get all the limbs in and not cropped/chopped/floating and can't understand why it didn't work!
 
think people will always argue over legs, arms, elbows, fingers and thumbs etc, but thats a little bit different from the sunject in hand namely the head chop on close portraits/ headshots ( really need to change the thread title )
 
as a quick experiment grabbed the camera and using hte 100-200 Canon EF lens attached ( ancient thing ) grabbed this shot of my 10 year old while she was fixed on playing minecraft on the xbox.
no flash just relied on the catch lights coming in from the window as wanted to get her unawares

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You would think that it is 'all about the face' and therefore whether the head is chopped or not doesn't really matter but I guess it depends on what you like personally. I tried cropping this one to a point around mid brow but comparing them side by side I preferred the uncropped one. I tried it with the scarf cropped out too but that didn't work for me either , I feel it belongs in the picture. Feel free to experiment with it please

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There are no rules, really. These are two separate shots from a test shoot I did last week:

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They're both pretty much as I composed them in-camera and they both have that Peter Hurley negative space thing going on but for me, the first one is just that bit more punchy.

Having said that, I would take bets on a client preferring the second one every time, so that's what I ran with for the final choice.
 
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