Sitting here here on the California coast in Bolinas, watching the surf break on the reef, the sun sets and the moon rises, full over the ocean reflecting off of the reef and the surf… It’s a piece of nature’s magic.

This is a photo that I posted a while ago on flickr. Recently I received a comment to the effect that I should crop it and make it essentially square to remove the palm leaves in the upper left hand corner. Apparently they disturbed the author. I look at each picture that I edit and almost invariably, I edit my photos in the camera. Consequentially, I rarely crop my photos, since I have taken them the way I want them. This is a hard thing for many people to understand. Cropping is fine, because the aspect ratio (ratio of width to height) is fixed by the camera design and sometimes that ratio just cannot express what is intended by the photographer. In that case I crop to get the correct ratio, eliminating what I didn’t want in the original. See the photo of the cucaracha below. When I took the photo, I intended for it to be square to just fit the round glass, so cropping was my intention at the time of shooting.