Cropping the Parking Lot Out of the Soccer Photo
Okay. We've done cutting junk off the edges and straightening a crooked horizon. Today's lesson is really just those two things showing up together in a photo everybody actually has: the kid's soccer game.
You know the one. Kid mid-kick, or more likely standing near the ball looking vaguely involved, and behind them is about forty feet of parking lot, somebody's minivan, a folding chair, and half a Gatorade cooler. The kid is the whole point of the photo and they're taking up maybe fifteen percent of it.
This is Jacob's photo, actually, from two doors down. His son plays rec league, and Jacob asked me how to make the pictures "pop." I flinched a little, I always do at that word, but I knew what he meant. He just wanted the picture to look like the kid was the point.
What we're actually fixing
Two things, usually, in a photo like this:
- Too much background that isn't doing anything. Parking lot, sky, sideline chairs. It's not bad, it's just not the photo.
- The subject is small and off to one side because you were sprinting along the sideline trying to keep up with a nine-year-old. No judgment. I know how that goes.
The fix is a crop, and it's a bigger one than you might think to make at first. People are shy about cropping tight. Try not to be.
The steps
- Open the photo in your app.
- Find the crop tool. Same one you used for the horizon lesson.
- Pull the frame in from the sides first. Get rid of the stuff that's obviously not the game. Extra parking lot, the edge of somebody's car, whatever.
- Now look at where your kid is in the frame. If they're dead center, that's fine, but a lot of times it looks better a little off-center, with more space in the direction they're facing or moving. You don't have to get fancy about this. Just nudge it and look.
- Pull in from the top and bottom too. Sky and pavement are the two biggest space-wasters in a sports photo. You usually need way less of both than you think.
- Step back and ask: is the kid the first thing my eye goes to? If yes, you're done. If the eye still wanders off to the cooler, crop more.
That's it. That's the whole lesson, structurally. But here's the part people get wrong, and it's the same part I got wrong on one of my very first edits.
Make one change, then actually look
My first real edit, ever, was a photo of a cedar board sitting in bad garage light. Yellow, dim, the kind of light where you can't tell what color anything actually is. I brightened it. I brightened it a lot, honestly, dragging that slider like more was always better. I looked at it right then and thought it looked great. Closed the app, felt pretty proud of myself.
Came back about an hour later and the thing looked like a photo of the sun. Just blown out, details gone, the wood grain I was trying to show off completely gone. It was worse than the original, and I hadn't been able to see that at all in the moment.
I've told a lot of people this since. When you're cropping a soccer photo and you keep pulling the frame in tighter, tighter, tighter because you're excited about how good it's looking, you stop being able to see it straight. Do the crop. Close the app. Go refill your water bottle, walk the dog, whatever. Come back in a few minutes and look with fresh eyes. You'll catch it if you cropped too tight and cut off an elbow, or if you overcorrected the tilt and now the goalpost's leaning the other way.
This is the same idea as undo not being failure. You're allowed to crop, look, and decide you went too far. Pull it back out a little. Nobody's grading the number of tries it takes.
The opinion part
Here's my actual opinion on this, and I'll say plainly it's an opinion and not gospel: most sports photos need a much bigger crop than people are comfortable making. The instinct is to keep a little bit of context, a little bit of "you can tell this is a game." You don't need much. A sliver of grass and a jersey number tells you it's soccer just fine. The parking lot is not adding information. It's just there because the camera was pointed that direction when you hit the button.
When I did this for Jacob, the crop I made felt aggressive to him. He kept saying "are you sure," and I kept saying yeah, look at your kid, that's the whole photo now. Once he saw it he got it immediately. Small edit, but his whole face changed, which is honestly the best part of teaching this stuff.
A quick, real caution
Cropping tight means you're throwing away pixels. If you crop way, way in on a photo that was already a little blurry or dark, that blur and grain gets more obvious, not less, because you've zoomed in on it without adding any actual detail. It's not a huge deal for a phone photo of a soccer game you're going to look at on a screen. It matters more if you're planning to print it big. Just know you can crop yourself into a slightly softer photo, and that's a tradeoff, not a mistake.
Before next time
Find a photo where the subject is small and surrounded by stuff that isn't the point, sports photos are perfect for this but it doesn't have to be sports. Crop it tighter than feels comfortable, close the app, come back in ten minutes, and see if you still like it. 😊