Shoot loose, and I'd recommend doing cropping yourself before you send things off to the printer. There's a lot of creative license when it comes to cropping, and I'd think you want to exercise that control yourself.


Twice a year, we do a charity gig with 150+ teams and 2500+ walkers. We shoot pictures of the teams, take the memory cards to a crew on laptops with Picasa (we don't have time for anything fancier), select, tune, crop, straighten, export, and send to Walgreen's for a 5x7 of each team. As soon as the prints are ready, they're whisked back to the event site, where we put them in frames and hand them to the team captains before they're done with the walk. One of the biggest things we tell the photographers is to shoot super loose - between the cropping to 5x7 and the edges covered by the frame, it's too easy to lose people, and we don't have time to reshoot the teams.