It’s not often that I crop my work. I like to shoot full frame, and utilize everything that the lens has to offer. I think I could trace this back to some of the printing snobbery I’d run across at my local printers, back when I was starting out. A lot of the big gun shooters would include the rebates in their prints, and editors really ate it up. It was around that time that I really fell for those two little teeth marks in my Hasselblad contact sheets & film, and started noticing full frame appreciation in magazines like The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine.
However, as nice as a full frame shot with rebate is, a close second is a nice crop by a talented Designer.
A few months back, Jen Clark, a Designer at Hambly & Wooley (an award winning design firm here in Toronto), gave me a ring to shoot local chefs for a piece in an upcoming issue of Toronto Magazine. It was a fun piece to shoot (chefs, in general, are the most hospitable people to photograph), and I just received the issue the other day, and I must say that I love the crop applied to the opening shot.
Here is the origional shot:
And here is the crop she applied…
…and how it appears in the magazine:
To help cure your curiosity, this is Chef David Garcelon of the Fairmont Royal York, and he’s a Bee Keeper. So dedicated is Chef Garcelon to his food, he actually has a Bee Hive colony on the roof of the Fairmont (that’s the 41 floor RBC Plaza behind him, and each of its windows is coated with a layer of 24 karat (100%) gold).
Another great Toronto chef I photographed for this piece was David Chrystian of Le Germain Hotel’s Victor Restaurant. David’s famous for his flavourful chicken dishes, so I asked him if we could photograph him with one of his heritage breed hens in the hotel’s remarkable lobby. He said it wouldn’t be a problem, but we’d have to shoot at 6 AM before the hotel patrons left for their morning meetings. So we got there at 5 AM, woke-up our Rode Island Red Hen, and got some funny looks from a few limo drivers waiting for their customers.
Seeing David Garcelon brought me back to when I got to meet and work with him at the Lodge at Kananaskis in Alberta. Great chef and person! Well done!