2008 Topps

I just bought a package of series one Topps at Wal Mart tonight. At first I wasn't really that keen on the team logos on the card, but it sort of grew on me. I still don't like the little Topps Tab in the middle of each card. I think it clutters up the framing of the shots so that they are awkwardly aligned in the card. One such example is of a shot of Phillies catcher Carlos Ruiz. It's a really cool shot of a catcher with his mask off reacting to a play. I can tell that it's a game shot because of the batter on to his left. The obvious problem to me, is that their is so much dead space on the left side of the frame.



I tried playing with it in photoshop to try and get a better crop of it. I don't know if it works or not, but I think it definitely brings more focus to the catcher and batters' expressions.



You can probably tell that a few things are missing besides the Topps logo. I kind of messed up the autograph and there's no trophy.

Adding the All-Star trophy seems to clutter up the image too much for me though.



I have a pretty good feeling why the original shot is framed the way it is. I think that in the original shot their was a lot of space on the top, bottom and the left of frame. I'm pretty sure that the way he/she shot it was that the right edge of the frame cut off the batter, but they liked the shot so much they wanted to include it in the set. I think it's a really awesome shot, but I don't like the cropping in the final version. The only problem with my amateur version is that I think it might be too square and not really horizontal or vertical enough for an actual card. It still shows what can come out of some creative cropping though.