How often do you crop?

I spent a big chunk of my life as a working pro photographer back in the film era, plus a big chunk as a film & video cameraman.

For neg/pos colour or B&W I always took the option to crop for granted, but I usually had to work within the aspect ratio constraints of standard paper sizes (quarter plate anybody? Foolscap?) and composed in the VF to match what I would be printing to, regardless of the film format (anything from square to 3:2).

I've also shot a helluva lot of slides, movie film and video. All of these had the restriction of making cropping (almost) prohibitive but the advantage of seeing (roughly) what you get in the viewfinder. That 'roughly' is important. It was practically impossible to get an exact match between the VF and the on-screen image. Even the much-vaunted 100% viewfinder of the Nikon F series would not exactly match the mask on a slide mount.

So you learn to frame as accurately as you can, but build in an allowance around the edges.

Nowadays you can see exactly what will be in your image. If you print to the same format as your camera produces then you can get away with not cropping. I believe that most of the time most of us don't use a tripod and take the leisure to check all the edges of the frame for intrusions. I'd guess that a big proportion of photographs would benefit from minor cropping.

Very often I see cases where a photograph needs a major crop to make a picture. This is worth pointing out because (a) the shooter might be able to get more out of his image with a bit of PP, and (b) he'll possibly be a bit more aware next time he frames something and get it better in camera.

Getting religious about 'I never crop' or 'it's more creative to crop' is pretty pointless. Just as long as people get the images they want I don't really care how they do it.

--
Albert
Every photograph is an abstraction from reality.