How many times have you seen a bird or something interesting outside and taken a picture through the glass and felt underwhelmed afterward? Or tried to get great shots of those fish or reptiles behind glass in an aquarium and thought you had done something wrong? The only thing you did wrong was to shoot through the glass.

Consider this simple test. I made sure my front door glass was very clean and shot some test images – some though the glass and some with nothing in between. I shot several of each case and chose the best of each. I used a Canon 7D MkII body with one of Canon’s sharpest lenses, their 300mm/f2.8.

Although I shot these in RAW, I did no processing afterward – no noise reduction or sharpening.

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Image on the right was taken through clean glass

Note that the image on the left is sharper than the one on the right. And this was shortly after doing a thorough cleaning of the glass. This is also fairly expensive glass door. Your results will be even worse shooting through double pane windows like are found in many houses today.

I’ve shot a lot of yard birds from inside my house and I’ve learned to not shoot through the glass. In the case of a robin family that had built a nest on the backside of a bush, next to my house, my only choice was to shoot from inside. In order to get the sharpest images possible, I lowered the upper half of the window and through the opening above.

2-1675-1024x685 Robins shot through an open window

You may not always have the luxury of avoiding glass but when you have to shoot through it you want it as clean as possible and you want to shoot directly through it, normal to the surface, and not at an angle. There’s a reason your house windows are not as expensive as your camera lenses. They are not made of optical glass.

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Most people probably don’t consider cropping for other than “zooming in” on their subject or adjusting the composition a little. That’s what I used to do. But I have learned to use cropping in creative ways, in order to bring out my subject or tell the story even better.

We’re all so used to the 2×3 aspect ratio of our 35mm format-based cameras as well as the 4×5 aspect ratio of the classic 8×10 frame. But these “standards” were determined a long time ago and were set up for general situations.
The world around us does not always exist in these aspect ratios. Although our vision covers roughly a 2×3 aspect ratio, what we actually concentrate on is less like a rectangle and more like an oval, and it changes based on the amount of light available and what we’re actually concentrating on. Night vision for example is very different than fully-illuminated, daytime vision and how much periphery are you noticing when you’re reading a book?
So although most of my images end up being based on either 2×3 or 4×5, I am not afraid to venture outside of this norm. After all, I figure that the vast majority of my images will never be seen in a frame, much less a “standard” one.

2391 Consider this image of a crowded intersection in New York City. This is a fisheye shot but I cropped off the top and bottom to let the view take in the width of the scene.

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In this image of a snowy egret, I shot and then cropped such that the bird was off to one side even though the subject was pretty much symmetrical. My intent was to grab the attention of the viewer by presenting a symmetrical subject in a conflicting frame or scene.

To the contrary, sometimes the 2×3 aspect ratio works better than anything else I could come up with. Consider this “as shot” image of a cow and her newborn calf. The long focal length allowed me to fill the frame with the scene perfectly. I was able to get a good balance of all the components at the time the image was acquired.

Although your in-camera composition will likely work for most of your shots, don’t rule out some creative cropping later. Cropping to 4×5 is always a good first alternative but keep an open mind for more drastic vertical and horizontal compositions.

Featured image: Great blue heron taken at Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge, Sanabel Island, Florida Canon 1Dx with Canon 500mm/f4 lens and 2X teleconverter

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Well, you shouldn’t be. While it is true that full frame sensors are better at high ISO imaging, you can get decent images with cropped sensors if you can get some control over your noise reduction. You can learn a little about noise in this article.

The first step is to shoot in RAW so you can manage your own noise reduction and sharpening, which work hand-in-hand. As you increase your noise reduction your image will need some extra sharpening. While shooting in JPEG lets the camera take care of it all for you, you can get much better results if you do it yourself.

Consider this image of a cormorant made with a cropped sensor camera. I was shooting an f4 lens and using a 2X teleconverter, so my fastest aperture was f8 which is pretty slow compared to most lenses. I had been using the built in noise reduction and sharpening found in the Adobe Camera RAW editor but I have since switched to Noiseware which gives me much better performance.

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You can see in the data listed at the bottom that I was shooting at a whopping 12800 ISO! But after proper noise reduction and sharpening I ended up with a very satisfactory image.

While I prefer to shoot at lower ISO values, I don’t worry too much about it. I know I’ll have to lose a little bit of detail in the end but I can still come out with a nice image after using the proper tools.

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