While it’s tempting to embrace those huge skies that you only seem to get in America – and while I would’ve happily used these images when I was a magazine editor, as the empty space in the sky would be perfect to put big headlines and text on top – when using these sorts of travel images online, this excess empty space can mean they lose their impact.
A bit of clever cropping is an easy way to lose these blank areas in the frame. So why don't you go for a panoramic-style crop? It’s a brilliant and quick fix for removing large areas of sky, or large empty bits of land or sea, like these shots by the beaches of California.
When I’m cropping these images, I don’t mean the classic 16:9 ratio favored for most panoramic shots; I’m talking about a more extreme 21:9 ratio for a proper widescreen movie experience.
The great thing with modern cameras is that the large file sizes captured by their high-resolution sensors mean that you can make some hefty crops and still be left with large, usable images.
These shots were taken with an old 30MP Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, which captures 6720 x 4480 images – more than enough pixels to crop. But, of course, when doing these 21:9 crops we’re keeping the full width, and therefore the full impact, of our high-res images.
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