Hi everybody this is Craig Tanner for The Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. Today’s image was submitted by John, he is a beginning photographer from the UK. John says he shot this at a wooded valley near Blackburn, Lancashire. He was drawn by the texture and color of the leaves and how that color contrast with the color of the water of the stream and he also said he loved the light in the background.

John shot this with a Canon 30D, 10.22 zoom lens at 60mm. so they’re effective at focal length. Here, is still pretty darn wide somewhere in the mid 20’s and John said at ISO 100 and at F/11 he took three different shots, three different shutter speeds and then layered them together to extend this dynamic range here.

And the questions and comments, John says, is there enough going on in the foreground? The whole interest is the background to jumbled. And would a black and white be a better choice? And lots of great questions; boy I love this image for the same reasons that John did.

Mainly, I love this outrageous quality of light here, it looks like just a little bit of fog is hanging around and its back lighting, you're getting this beautiful feeling of not only light moving into the shot back here, in terms of a beams of light coming through the fog, you also get this really beautiful pass of light. They’re moving through the image on a carpeted leaves, that sort of accentuates the real powerful feeling of movement in the image and also, just the trees back here are doing the same thing.

Quality of line is huge in this image, you know John mentioned the color contrast between the warm winter leaves and the reflected blue in the water that creates a real powerful feeling of movement of line which helps to lead the aisle all the way to the image in this vertical, lots of things to really enjoy here.

And this image is a really interesting image to look at, in terms of something that we’ve been talking about quite a bit in the Daily Critique lately. which is the idea of elements of visual design, with one of them being the way that the average viewer of our photograph has been trained to look at printed media and how that starts to play in.

Let’s first look at John’s question, he says, is there enough going on the foreground to hold interest? And what’s really interesting to me is that in the color version, the foreground for me gets lost a little bit and here’s why.

The viewer really likes to move from left to right and the viewer has been trained not only to do that but to end up down here in the bottom right hand corner and was interesting in this color version and this orientation, is that if I start in here somewhere, the photograph is asking me to move against the way I naturally want to move, it’s asking me to go from right over to the left. It’s also asking me to go from up down and this is a pretty hard way for the viewer to move.

The other thing that’s happening is that if I come in here somewhere, this is such a strong line of color contrast and also value contrast. Now, I’m being asked to end up in a corner that I’m not used to ending up in, I'm still being pulled against this grain of movement that goes in this direction and that ends up making this sort of a challenged area of the picture, for me as the viewer.

What’s really interesting, as John mentioned black and white, if we look at black and white, very different feeling because before I had to do this conversion, imagine the color contrast of the water and the leaves going away and imagine how bright this area of the image is relative to this area. So this contrast if going to go away, this is going to start to become a lot more visually heavy and now the movement is going to be from top left to bottom right, which is a way that the viewer likes to move. And now the foreground is going to be able to work with other things in the image, instead of being an area of the image; it feels like it’s just not quite working with or balancing out this real strong movement over here.

Black and white, very, very different feeling in terms of movement, curious to hear from other people, if they felt the same thing. To me, after I convert it to black and white and looked at it, sit here for a minute, the movement now starts to seem to be a lot more natural to my eye. And I can imagine working on this from here and ending up with a variation that I like a lot and one of the things that I would do here is I would come in on a blank layer in soft light blending mode; let me make that layer active, and when I turn it on you’ll see that it’s flat and blending mode in paint at a very low opacity with the brush on white and accentuate the beams of light back there in the background. They're already there, so it's pretty easy to come in and just use that technique of creating a more of a lighting effect. And then I could say just playing around with the value and continue to sort of shape the way I want the viewers’ eye to move in the image. But I do like black and white of version quite a bit here.

Something else that this image makes me think about is a variation. Particularly, if we’re talking about color, where –let me make this active again down here, where we come in and put a longer lens and just shoot a panel of the image, it looks like this. Because again, I’m going to be working with the way the eye wants to move here real strong on this top left to bottom right diagonal of and it really gets rhymed and accentuated by some of the very strong lines of the trees and contrast there, there’s some real simple rhythm back in here; the boulders here and here and here now really play very beautifully off of this half circle, this area and this area can balance each other as a reflection right next t each other. The quality of light is very strong all back in there, if we could bring that out, so it’s another variation that I think about here and here’s something that’s totally fascinating to me.

If we take the color version based on this idea of visual movement and we flip it horizontal, has a very different effect all because now the movement is sort of congruent with left or right. If we start here, we go in this direction, we start here, we end up here, we move from left to right which is how we want to move but we end up on the page and the place that’s more comfortable for us, this diagonal starts to play in a way this starts to play with the rest of the image now in a way that feels a little bit more congruent.

You know if I had this variation, again, I definitely would pop the idea of the beams of light using that technique of creating a lighting effect in the background. I’d also bring up the RGB; the red, green and blue by adding more saturation, I think you can add even more than I’ve added. Here’s before and there is after right there.

Something else, if you, you know, if you’re open to flipping this and now you’re going to really sort of move away from the reality, the situation’s something else that you could do, take quite a bit of work, you could use another layer and warp this image from the interior and make this bank more rhythmic with this bank to unify the color version even a little bit more.

Here’s a hideously rough just to give you a suggestion of what I’m talking about, you know and this is if you’re really open to change an editorial content. Lots of things to think about, you might think, “Well, so what this is just you Craig, we’re talking about bunch of stuff after the fight, what is it have to do with shooting? It has everything to do with shooting.

If you’re interested in design at the level of shooting traditionally, trying to communicate to a lot of people with your photographs. We talk about the language of design here because it does matter if you’re trying to communicate to a lot if people. You can be the kind of artist that says “the hell with all that,” and you're going to just do it your way and you’re going to have enough whatever; enough courage, enough ability to market your work to just say whatever you want to say and everything else and everyone else be damned. That’s real hard to pull off if we’re going to think about design then one of the things that we should think about is how the viewer wants to look at the image and so while we were there, we could start to say, you know how is the viewer’s eyes going to move in this image and maybe because of that, maybe I do want to think about seeing this image in monochrome. And if I’m going to plan on printing this in monochrome, then maybe I want to move the camera a little bit while I’m here, maybe I want to shoot some other variations, so on and so forth.

I’d love to hear your feedback, write to Critique today, stunning, stunning landscape shot from John. John says he’s a beginning photographer, I wish I took pictures like this when I was a beginning photographer. Big thank you to John for sharing this image released on The Mindful Eyes Daily Critique.