What it comes down to for me is that cropping an image during post processing often yields me a result I find more pleasing than the 'original'. Sadly not every single shot taken when I depress the shutter-button is one that I would hang up on my wall. I'm lucky if half the photos I take in a day are respectable!
But it sure is dang cool when, perusing my Lightroom collection, my eyes stumble across an image from months ago that I hadn't even looked at twice. And in a vibrant flash of inspiration, I mentaly crop it down into a picture that I would look fowards to showing off to my friends. An edit that I wouldn't have thought of then at the time.
You know what I would love? If I was godly enough to be proud of every image I took. And if, while looking through the lense, I got exactly the exposure I wanted every time. Heck, even if I KNEW the exact exposure I wanted every time would be nice.
But I'm not that good. And if later, in photoshop, I snip a few pixels off of the edge of an exposure so that I'm happier with it, then... well... I'm happy.
Because later my friends will exclaim in delights of "oohs!" and "ahhhs!" over the picture. And not a single one of them will criticize me that I removed an inch or so. Or even know that I had.
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