There are usually some functional reasons to prefer one cropping of a photo over another cropping-- how it fits on a newspaper page, or how it leads the eye, emphasizing one object over another. But more often, which crop is the best one is based on only an aesthetic concern. I don't mean "only aesthetic" as if it were trivial-- I mean it in the sense of "strictly aesthetic". Aesthetic differences can be big-- fotogs sometimes stew in anger for days when a bad crop is applied to one of their photos.

At the other end of the spectrum, I recently ran across a shot from Star Ice & Fuel that has an unusually large number of aesthetically and functionally good crops.

Here's the uncropped version:

It's perfectly fine as is. It would look fine if it ran large, and even if it ran somewhat small it would still be readable.

But one might want to crop it for aesthetic reasons, or to fit a layout on a page. Here are the obvious crops, one horizontal and one vertical:

Both versions of the shot convey the same information as the original, and in my opinion, both look fine.

But my favorite crop turns out to be close to square (which is quite unusual):

I like how keeping the guy low emphasizes the height of the stack of bagged ice, and cropping off the left edge allows the stack to be of indeterminate size.

And for this shot there are other good crops. A tilted crop would have looked like a mistake 25 years ago, but our collective visual senses have evolved, and, for this photo, a tilt in either direction adds some dynamism:

I don't prefer these crops, but they aren't so bad as to be poor crops, either. Such a crop might be quite effective because of how the picture plays adjacent to some particular other shot in a layout.

And finally there are minor variations: a more extreme vertical, a more extreme horizontal, and a tighter crop, which cuts into the taut plastic, but might be useful if the picture had to run really small.

It was the opportunity to shoot past figures in deep shade toward the noontime brightness that attracted me. Only later did their dancing perk up to make for a good moment.
(Ariene Reich-Norris, left, daughter Arianna Reich-Norris, Jayden Deagan, and Destiny Faison, right, dance to the music of "Bretonvangrohl" at the Tacoma Farmers Market on Broadway.)