When I’m not shooting, loused out with post-production, tied up with admin at home, walking the dog, beasting myself in the gym or procrastinating about an imminent tax return, I’ve found some cathartic pleasure in ‘paying it forward’ so to speak, to a small, like-minded community on Reddit.com.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PhotoshopRequest/
This group exists simply to help other Redditors ‘fix’ a particular issue with an image, everything from restoring a torn, battered photo from the last century, to digitally removing a jilted family member from a group shot. It’s just a bit of harmless fun, keeps my hand in on the post-production front and there’s obviously a small dose of dopamine to be had if other users ‘like’ your work by ‘upvoting’ it. I’ve done a few recently, for complete strangers and for no reward, settling for positive feedback, but I rarely employ the full Photoshop experience on what I consider to be snapshots at home. That said, a comment on a recent Instagram post prompted me to write this blog.
Rory is, of course, absolutely correct. It’s one of those, ‘once you’ve seen it’ moments, not that I hadn’t, I was just caught on the hop, trying not to succumb to the 20 mins of admin it would have taken to square it. Couple of clicks here and there, filter, contrast, crop; Instagram makes it very easy to fix up a pic to publishable in a matter of seconds. There is, however, a backstory that I didn’t think I was going to have to share, but given the circumstances, I feel I must.
The legs in question belong to a spectator obviously, but not just any old parent, it happened to be the mother of the lad that my boy just completely wrong footed, skinning him to get himself close to the key, providing a lovely assist for his teammate to score an uncontested layup. A proud Dad moment indeed and delighted to have rattled off a couple of frames capturing it for eternity, but it’s an awkward composition at best. The expression on the other lad’s face, combined with his Mum in the background, make it much more of a ‘scrapbook keeper’ than would otherwise be the case, as every social poster worth their salt knows however, landscape images just don’t cut it on ‘The Gram’.
The best ratio for ‘The Gram’ in my opinion is a 5×4 (vertical) image. There’s lots of social media gurus out there, queuing up to tell you the optimum size and resolution for any given platform, but in my experience, this gives the best possible use of the prime real estate on a smart phone’s screen, owning every last pixel of the space available. The absolute antithesis would be a vertically captured video, viewed on a tv monitor. Arrrrrrggggghh! Pet hate, but that’s for another day.
So I cropped it, as seen on the original post and yes, the legs stood out like a sore thumb, but I knew the back story, so they stayed, that’s okay right? Clearly not. I couldn’t get this far without addressing the issue, so for no other reason than to keep Rory happy and maybe to justify these ramblings, here you go…
Happy Shopping.
Pip
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