Cropping a portrait is a difficult thing to do. We don’t want the leave out anything, so we tend to capture as much as possible. But the closer you get to the subject, the more intimate will it be. The closer you get on the face, the more dominating will the eyes and the mouth be – and the more you reveal about the expressions made by them. In my opinion close-up shots with a very tight crop are the most captivating to look at. You can easily crop the portrait in your postprocessing, but try to think about it, when you take the photo. Which part do you want to display and where do you want the eyes to go in your composition. Try do take the picture as close to the intended cropping as possible so you don’t waste your megapixels on something else than capturing all the details.
As a rule of thumb: When you crop, crop a lot. Don’t just remove the top of the head. Crop at the forehead. Don’t just remove the edge of an ear. Crop close to the eye instead. Don’t cut small things like the chin, crop at the shoulders instead. In general, don’t crop anything at a place that will make it look “skinny” and unintentionally amputated at the edge. Try to measure the edge. If the “amputated body” doesn’t take up a significant part of the length of the edge, you should probably crop somewhere else.
