How often and how much do you crop?

timo wrote:

A quote from one of Mike Johnston's recent posts on his excellent The Online Photographer website, talking about viewfinders:

'Winogrand often barely looks through his viewfinder at all. Cartier-Bresson hid his camera behind a handkerchief in his hands, and it was said that he could get it to his eye, take a picture, and hide it again before most people even noticed what he was doing.'

In other words, precise framing in the camera wasn't their greatest priority. Which runs somewhat counter to all those people who obsess about 'getting it right in the camera'.

To obsess has negative connotations ("preoccupy or fill the mind of someone continually, intrusively, and to a troubling extent") that I don't think are applicable to most people who prefer not to crop or otherwise edit their pictures. It's not an obsession; it's just a way of doing things. When I shot slide film, I composed my picture in the viewfinder, knowing that whatever was in the frame when I took the shot would be on the screen when the slide was projected. I do the same with JPEG images. There's nothing intrusive or troubling about it because it's just taking pictures the way I've always taken pictures.

For many great photographers, cropping, either radically or as fine adjustment, has always been part of the creative process. Personally I enjoy it - many photos are improved that way. Plus ... there's nothing sacrosanct about particular aspect ratios. They are just accidents of history.

How much time and concentration do you give to cropping

There was a time when I might crop a bit because my DSLR did not have a 100% viewfinder, and sometimes there could be a distracting surprise or two around the edges. At present I'm using a camera whose viewfinder is accurate enough not to have that problem.

before you post images online or have them printed?

I don't post online or have pictures printed.  As with slides, I prefer to just view them on a screen.