How often do you crop?

I crop all the time. If you're dealing with subjects that move, I find that capturing the right *moment* is more important than having the framing perfect in-camera.

If you read Annie Leibovitz's biography (which is altogether not that interesting), she says that getting over her fear of cropping was a watershed moment that helped her push her creativity to the next level. If I remember it correctly, she'd originally been taught to never crop - just as you seem to have been taught.

But when she started working for magazines and newspapers, she wouldn't necessarily have control over the aspect ratio of the final image because they had to fit onto the page with an article. It took seeing that process to understand how it could improve her images by changing the subject space in the frame, removing distractions from the edge - or simply allowing creative choices to be made after the image has been taken.

If you're taking pictures just for yourself and you don't want to crop, fine. But cropping is a perfectly valid technique for many, especially if your images are going to be used by others after they've been taken. When most people's digital images could end up on everything from a printed copy, to a computer wallpaper, to a Facebook title image - cropping choices are as much a part of the image as holding the camera in the first place.