One of my friends works up at the local hospital, and when she stopped in for a visit last weekend she was telling me about the bees that drop in to the water feature in the hospital grounds to have a drink.

“I thought of you and your camera.  I’ll give you a call on Saturday and you can come and look!”

Husband took her call…

“J’s calling about the bees.”
“The bees…?”
“Yeah, the bees.”
“Bees?”
“Yeah, the bees.”
“Ohhhh, the bees!”

So, camera in hand and macro firmly affixed I set off to photograph the bees, figuring that if I was majorly stung, at least I was in the right place to get help in a hurry.

But back to The Weekend Photo Project and cropping.

Here’s the original:

Notice the bees legs in the bottom-left corner?

I don’t like them because they’re distracting from the story I’m telling here – a bee drinking – so I cropped said bee-legs out (I certainly wasn’t going to flick it out of the way!).  I’ve composed as tightly as I could – I couldn’t move much due to a gazebo structure that surrounds the water feature – so cropping let me get rid of the distracting element.

Which is pretty much how I tend to use composition and cropping.  Try to get in right in camera, but if you really can’t, then crop.

And I didn’t get stung!