Anatomy of a micro-cropping

It had been a while since I spent considerable time in Gafield Park, the city park near my house. I decided to change that after Friday's first snowfall of the season. It was only 2 inches, but thanks to some very strong gusts, low windchill temperatures kept the snow hanging around.

I nearly aborted the shoot on a couple of occasions because that wind was numbing my fingertips to the point where I occasionally couldn't find or feel the shutter button on the camera, even though I was wearing gloves (with tiny holes in the index fingers and thumbs), forcing me to pause and stick my bare hands in my pants pockets to rub against my thighs to warm up. The technique worked, by the way, and I ended up spending two hours out there photographing.

I came up with several scores of photographs, many involving variations (or different perspectives) of the same composition. And even though I revisited some familiar places, I also managed to find and grab some first-time shots. That's notable, remember, because this is a park I've dropped in on a lot over the years, and in all of the seasons of the year.

The question that came to me when I went to post some of these shots at this blog is ... where to start?

I figured that since I'd devoted some time to black-and-white photography in the previous post, I'd start there -- with black-and white. I converted a lot of my shots Friday to monochrome, and the ones you see in today's post will be crops from the same, single frame.

The idea to cull multiple crops -- and to do so in monochrome -- came to me not at the point of shoot, but as I was processing the picture afterward. It started with the color frame you see at right, an image taken from the pedestrian bridge over Bean Creek, adjacent to the Sunken Garden. The view looks south. I first moved to convert the color frame to monochrome, the image you see leading off the post. Finally came the vertical (portrait orientation) micro-crops below.

I call it ... anatomy of a cropped frame. Future posts will be devoted to other shots from the shoot.