Marquis Conlon photo cropped?

[steve B]

Most photographers do, at least a little. They take the picture they can, then adjust to get the picture they want.

There are exceptions, I thin Ansel Adams would wait for hours after setting up a shot to get just the right lighting. But then he was dealing mostly with landscapes.

I worked briefly in a photo lab and they did that sort of work and more.
On the flip side, a friend worked for the photo shop almost across the street. One customer worked for the Boston Globe, and had a couple cameras with auto winders and extended film magazines. He did sports, and would be given a list of shots the paper wanted and if for instance they wanted a pic of Rice at bat when ever he was at bat the guy would simply hold down the shutter and take what would end up being hundreds of pictures. Each extended magazine held enough film for 3000 pictures, so it was a LOT of photos taken. He'd give the film to the Globe who had their own photo lab. If something special happened he'd get the pics developed as a rush service, give the Globe sections of the film, and keep some to sell to other news services. He did pretty well since he was usually the first with pictures.

I saw a bunch of contact prints from one of his rolls of film, most of the pictures were pretty bad, but maybe 1 in 100 was really good.