What do you do with old photos that were badly composed? Is there any way to make them better? Here is what works for me … sometimes …

When I first started taking photos of landscapes, I just followed my gut—if I saw an impressive scene, I just snapped away. The photo in this post was one of those times. This scene was at Bear Lake on the border of Utah and Idaho, back in March of 2013 it was still frozen from winter. I have not seen a frozen lake since I was a kid growing up in Ukraine, so this definitely brought up some old memories and made a strong impression. Besides that, this lake is humongous, spanning for miles long and wide, so it is very impressive in itself.

Naturally, I started snapping away, taking a bunch of shots, and not being impressed with any of them after looking at them on the computer. Recently I was reviewing those photos, and wanted to try to improve at least one of those shots as much as possible.

In this post I summarize the issues with the original photo and how I finished the main photo by cropping it.

The Original Shot and the Issues

Here is the original photo:

There are a few issues with this photo.

1. There is junk that distracts the eye at the bottom center and at the left side of the photo.
2. The composition is divided vertically in half, which confuses the viewer who now does not know whether to look at the rocks on the left or the ice on the right.
3. The picture is divided horizontally almost in half, which adds to the confusion.
4. The horizon line is a little bit crooked.

The issues are summarized in the picture here:

Fix by Cropping

After looking at this photo for a few minutes and thinking about what I like and don’t like about this photo, I realized that the reason I took this photo was the huge iced lake, and not the rocks, the sky, or the junk. So to emphasize my point, I played around with the crop tool in Lightroom, and settled on this:

I think this move alone really makes the picture stronger by eliminating all the unnecessary stuff. Once the crop was done, I did some basic adjustments, and here is the final picture:

Not all photos that come from the camera are great, matter of fact, most photos, especially in the beginning are pretty bad. But just because that photo is not what you originally envisioned, do not delete it. You never know, maybe one day you will find a way to fix it, like I did with this photo from Bear Lake.

I believe that anyone can make the most awesome photos they can imagine! All they have to do is learn a few easy basics. I hope to inspire you to also pick up a camera and develop your own photographic vision.

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The Crop

The Original Shot and the Issues