In yet another of these golden hour street photographs, with my shadow in the frame, we have The Three Amigos. I don’t know if they are actually friends, but they appear to be, and I like the title.

Unlike the first two photos in this street photography series, I cropped this image heavily, removing the distracting people on the right. The resulting photo better unambiguously tells the story. I used to hate cropping pictures, it felt like I was cheating by not getting the composition perfect in camera. I no longer feel this way.

I’ve discovered that some of the masters of photography cropped extensively. Plus, with higher-resolution digital cameras, cropping still results in pictures with adequate resolution. The Sony A7C has 24MP and this larger-than-usual crop resulted in a 14.8MP image, enough to fully cover the 5K Apple Monitor I use.

I’ve been satisfied with the Sony 28mm f2 lens, which is an older design and doesn’t have any of the modern G or GM designations signifying a superior lens. However, I’m not thrilled with the sharpness in this photograph, particularly on the left side. You might not be able to tell in these small web-sized images, but the photograph feels soft and vague. The sharpness would have improved if I had used a smaller aperture instead of f2.5.

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