How would you crop this?

[mdm]

Given that this one is all over the place and leads the eye out of the frame, how would you crop it?

[Ari]

Like this...
Got rid of the slightly-OOF branches, and tidied up the other sides.
You could erase or crop out the stick in the lower right corner if it still is bothersome.

[Jody_S]

[Gem Singer]

This is a drastic crop. Would have used a different lens and composed the image on the GG this way.

[Vaughn]

No, but I'd make it a vertical. Rotated 90 degrees anti-clockwise.

[mdm]

Yes tightening up to 5x6 helps and strangely so does tipping it up on its side. Sometimes I just point the camera blindly and leave the composition up to chance to see what happens.

[Leigh]

I would vote for Jody's square crop.

This is just a photo of chaos, and chaos has no inherent orientation.

- Leigh

[Fred L]

Mine is almost identical to Ari's crop but just a wee bit tighter on the sides.

[Jon Shiu]

I think the original uncropped version is the best. Maybe just do a little edge burning. It has a naturalness and wholeness to it.

Jon

[mdm]

Chaos interests me hugely because there is no chaos. Thats what chaos theory does, and other statistical fields, it puts order into chaos. Also chaos avoids cliche which is the great friend of composition. If you want to see cliche look for the most refined composition or a poor imitation. I have no interest in that. I want my pictures to have chaos AND coherence. So as a result I have no fear of chaos, the coherence is the hard part.