What a difference a crop makes

Kind people compliment me on the pictures I post on Facebook. I'll admit that I've been given a few tips on how to make a photo interesting but I'm basically a point and shoot picture taker. When I get home I use a very old version of Photoshop Elements to make a few adjustments when necessary. Most often that means straightening and cropping. 

I took this from a moving car by lowering the window and pointing the camera held in one hand out the top of the window. Then I cropped and resized the photo.

This is what went on Facebook.

This was the original. Note the window in the upper left corner.

And I snapped two other pictures from which to choose as well as a couple of others on the other side of the highway which I didn't feel were worth working with. This was one of them.

Why didn't I like this one? There really wasn't anything interesting enough in the photo to make cropping worth the effort. If I did crop, the resolution of the resulting image would be blurry due to too few pixels. You can see that at the left of the top image.

My advice to would be photographers? Check out some online pointers then take lots of photos. Use the software that came with either your camera or your computer to adjust your photo as needed. 

Taking lots of photographs as well as looking at others' efforts provides a new way of looking at the world around us. It's fun.

PS I have a pink Panasonic 14 megapixel Lumix DMC-FH6. You will almost always see the string hanging out of my pocket.