Hi everybody this is Craig Tanner for The Mindful Eye and The Daily Critique.

Today’s image was submitted by Chris who is an intermediate photographer from Austria. Chris shot with a Canon 5D Mark II 17 to 40 zoom and ISO 400stop down to F22 and it’s exposed to 4.8 of a second. I want to come back and talk about that aperture in just a second.

In the questions and comments Chris says, “What about the composition, would be better to crop this image? I’m not sure if the sky is too dramatic. How can I improve the image?” And, one of the things that Chris said was it had rained and the sun was coming back out there was a big thing that motivated him to take this picture. And one of the reasons like this frame so much he was going for this sun star effect and he got the sort best effect in this frame.

Let’s get right into it, there’s a lot that I want to try cover today. And I apologize when I go a little fast. I love the sun star in this image. It’s a really beautiful main subject. This is really cool technique if you use just part of the sun you’ll get a better effect of the sun star. This is prior to stopping a lens down to it’s smallest or very nearest aperture on this particular lens. F22 is the smallest aperture. How much of the sun does makes this work? This is a kind of thing where the sun is going behind the mountain or it’s going around the tree or something. I would just encourage you to keep shooting so that you have a lot of different examples because this is something that you can just eyeball but it does work better when you’re only using part of the sun.

And if I have to guess, I’d say it’s something like less than a third of the disk of the sun. Maybe it would be a bit less. One thing to remember is that when you take this lens or really almost any lens and stop it down to the smallest aperture, you‘re going to get a big overall lost of sharpness and contrast because of the diffraction. And so much of the time when doing a sun star effect and I have to shoot right into the sun. And I want to create sun star effect what I’ll do is I will shoot one frame in F22 or another way of saying it probably better is just to say that I would sort of nail the scene. The sun’s in here somewhere and I will kind of nail everything else in the scene the way that I want it than shooting it an aperture that’s sharper overall like F8 or F11. And as the sun got really close to going behind I might switch to F22 and then pop a bunch of frames over the course set to 30 seconds or a minute trying top get the best effect and then I would layer. I would have been on the tripod to do this work then I would layer in the frame with the best sun star with the frame where I have I shot the scene in a smaller aperture.

You can just keep going back and forth too between the apertures here. But I really wanted to make that point about F22 being good for the star, but not good for your overall sharpness.

In addition to the moment that’s a really beautiful clearing. This is great example sort of creating this graphical element by doing the sun star. I love the sky here, I love the way this backlight is lighting the landscape. I love the movement of those lights down into this darker shadow and then this really strong feeling of color and light on the top of this. To me this is one of the most important subjects in the whole frame. This really it’s like an anchor and in the image it really starts to make it more of a story kind of image at this. It really helps to invite me to go down into the image and feel like moving into it.

I love the way these trees are sort of pushing me out and accentuating the feeling of getting to this and then I love the way the line of the sun star brings me up into the clouds bring me back around here. It’s a really beautiful warm and cool colors, beautiful backlight on the tree here. When I think about improving the image Chris mentioned the crop and I do like a crop on this image where I would come in from the right and take that tree out. That ends up being sort of like a vertical pino and I would like to talk more like that in just a second.

I think I might like this tree better if it been manged better in Photoshop. This looks like one of the deals where Chris, I don’t know if he bracketed frame is what he did try and open this up. But even looking at small file there’s some halo in you get sends up it here. What it really starts to do is make this maybe way more high contrast that it needed to be. And instead of being a balance with the sun and with this line with the darker the mountains and with the left hand side of the frame having a lot of weight, and kind of also helping to complete a circle just the way the clouds are going here in way in this line is going. It’s starts to overwhelm and then over here you also have all of this negative space and so I will think about it crop.

If I crop it like this and end up with this real strong feeling of a vertical pino. And I don’t like it being that vertical, what could I do? I could go to image size and I could go to this dialog box and uncheck this constraint proportions and make the image wider than it is long to try and widen out a little bit. How far I’m going to be able to, I have to eyeball it. Like they are too far on the structure and there’s going to start weird things just like skewed unnaturally. So I went for a 100 pixels wider than long her just to see what that fells like and I think you probably get with this right here if you never saw the original. The sun is looking a little bit weird. But you could come in and do this on a separate layer and then layer that more tighter ball of the sun back in the middle. And I should’ve done that anyway. And we can also just to start over and not go that far. But not only would I do this if I needed to possibly do the work that we’re doing today where I have to crop in but I wanted to maintain a certain aspect for the show. What I would do to this as a matter of course to a lot of 35 millimeter vertical to make them congruent 8x10 because I feel like making them wider than longer. A lot of times slows the eye down and works better anyway.

Could we keep going with this? Sure we could, we could use rescaling we could come in and make a selection of that top part of the sky something like this. Put that up on it’s own layer go to edit, transform scale, you get it when I’m going with this. Scale this down a little bit I could do the same thing at the bottom scale it up and keep laying on this. Go ahead and apply that and then crop. And I could keep leaning on this file in several different ways and get it back to something closer to a 35millimeter aspect ratio without losing anymore information over here. So I just want to mention that is a part of re-scaling.

We’re not going to have the time but what I’ll tell you what I’m going to do is I’m going to release a video on Thursday called the great photo finish. This is to start some Photoshop videos that I’m going to be doing a new feature called the great photo finish. And I’m going to show you what Chris might have done just one technique that he might have used here to be able to extend the dynamic range in a very complicated area like this where just painting on the mask might not be practical. I’m going to show you 1 technique and there’s a ton of them in a landscape shop where Chris had the brackets light and dark or even he shot this in raw and he converted couple of files out of the raw converter we might be able to extend the dynamic range and here now creating this much contrast. That will happen open Thursday.

Beautiful shot from Chris I mean it’s just stunning. I love the quality of light. This location—I wish I was there right now. This is just so inviting being up high and being able to walk down in the image and the quality of light in the mountains is just really stunning. I can see why Chris was drawn to shoot this. I want to say a huge thank you Chris for sharing this image with us on The Mindful Eye Daily Critique we’ll see it again on the great photo finish episode on Thursday.

Thanks for being here everybody.