Beach houses on Texelby Peter Tennekes
One of the most important and easy editing tool you have is cropping. Most people stick to the standard 4:3 (or 3:2) aspect ratio (often a check-box ‘constrict to master aspect ratio’ or something like this). This is not needed. You should pick the crop which works best for the image at hand. Your photo is an artistic expression and shouldn’t be limited by some arbitrary standard.
Things to take into consideration are getting rid of distractions, overall composition (like Rule of Thirds), good color balance etc.
The argument for sticking to the ratio is the standard photo paper sizes. Most images live on the web nowadays and never get printed. And when you do want to print, you can easily add borders to fit it to the paper.
Happy shooting (and cropping)
