Hi everybody, this is Craig Tanner for the Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. Today’s image was submitted by Shelly who’s an intermediate photographer from California. Shelly shot this with the Nikon D700, 7200 millimeter zoom at 200 millimeter with an ISO 1600 in F6.3, expose the file for a quarter of a second. Shelly has a great back story connected to this image. She was in the Yosemite National Park, this is a scene that was just outside here hotel, very near the road. It comes into the hotel and she saw this Dogwood Blossom in one of the photographs so she started to frame it with the 70 to 200. She started to notice that, in this really low light, that the road way that was behind the flower and this is at here, was reflecting a lot of blue so she started to go longer and longer with her zoom to try narrow the background to accentuate this. She said as she worked on it, the light got lower and she was sort of getting into the situation where the wind was blowing a little bit and there were cars on the road and she didn’t want those in the shot. She said she finally just had a desperation, had to start shooting because it was getting so dark and she ended up with some shots that had this out of focus cartel lights in them and to her surprise, she ended up liking those shots the most and this is one of them. So when I get in to the critique and I want to comeback to the back story, I love image, I think it’s really beautiful and like Shelly I love the cartel light here.

To me it does a lot of things for the image, it creates a really beautiful rhythm between the shape of the flower and the design to the flower and that rhythm is implied on a real power diagonal in the shot. Now the contouring lines in an image are really important but a lot of times the implied line or visual pathway in between subjects that are important in the image, a lot of times, this quality of line or quality of movement is more important than the contouring lines and I think that’s definitely true in this image. The color of the headlight here being red is also really beautiful in the context of the other subjects to the image. You get this suggestion of the green, blue and red, or orgy and beige triad, very powerful color triad and you have a really strong sense of white here. Red and white play very well together. You also have a pretty song sense of black for the potential for it and red, white and black play well together. So really beautiful from a color standpoint, just you know the idea of cyan and red too from the printer’s color wheel as a complimentary color pair. The other thing that I really like about this image is Shelly’s subject choice and how she’s chosen a flower here that does separate from the background in a really dramatic way. You know it’s really easy see our positive space shapes in the image and to just think about subjects and positive space shapes but negative space shapes, negative space ideas are just as important and sometimes it’s not more important than our subjects for positive space shapes. I just love how Shelly has included quite a bit of negative space, this simple and dark, in the most basic sense it helps the flower to separate. But on another level, psychological level, you have all these round up energy then is, a lot of times the kind of image that it can take a lot are simple sort of just homogenous negative space. Even though Shelly has this negative space, it’s really simple.

There’s still movement here and the movement is beautiful because it starts to rhyme some of the other ideas in the image so I just wanted to talk a little bit about positive and negative space shapes. And of course the way depth of field has been managed here really contribute to this surreal feeling that we’re getting from the headlight and the white color shifts and just the way this real sort of stark reality and sharpness of the flower kind of moves into this very ethereal part of the image. It can have a pretty psychological impact on the viewer. When I started to think about perfect well improvement for the image, there’s sort of a basic technical thing that I think about in a crop variation that I want to show you but before I do that. Another reason that I picked this image is I just wanted to talk again about the back story and I think Shelly has really sort of given us a gift here and sharing with us is very powerful. And as the idea that she had a concept but then there was the wind and the cars that she felt like was pushing her towards the place where it was going to sort of wreck the concept and then finally actually kind of a curtain coming down on the day and the dark just kind of force to be there now and to engage and just say the heck with, I’ve got to start taking pictures. That pretty much describes the next step workshops that almost nutshell describes the kind of arc in the story that we try to go on each workshop. People show up at the workshop a lot of times and we’re still in this mode of photography is about the right set of conditions and being at the right place and there’s no doubt that those things can be critically important to how much fun we’re having in all kinds of things. But when we start to turn that around and get to a place and say whatever reality we’re at.

It is miraculous and all of our great shots have only come out of each moment. They don’t come out of what we’re building on from the past. This is, that’s an illusion and they also don’t come out of waiting. Great photographs do not come out of waiting. Great photographs come out of taking an action and the more that we take an action that is being a photographer clearly the more creative we are and I just love the story and I need to hear it as much as anybody. So just thinking about this concept, we’re doing something, something happens and instead of fighting it, it’s very cliché to say but it’s so true, it is powerful. Just go with it or go with the flow and we could even take it to another level. We could ask ourselves, whenever it starts to feel challenged and we come out of just being and being productive and just being in the moment, we could say okay I’ll slip it here, you know, how can I work with this? Instead of wishing it away, waiting for it to end, you know just wasting a bunch of time and power, how can I work with this? The thing that it seems to be through the part that I don’t want, to be better than I’ve ever been before and as far as the changes here, getting back to something technical, this is kind of a ethereal role open version and you can seat the histograms, kind of those perfect histograms, perfect detail. But I can imagine if we shot this on slide film or even some color negative films, it’ll be a lot more low end in the image. And it’s the low end so much of the time that gives images, photographs that are two-dimensional media is what creates the illusion of forming out. I like to add a little more low end, I’d also like to add more warmth here to the middle of the Dogwood because this does ultimately go warm as the blossomed ages and play that a little bit more off of this.

And just add a little more of a color differences, color contrast, so value contrast, color contrast and more up here, I’ve just combined all that for time sake. Put on a huge change to the image, I’d love to here what think about this changes and then there’s the crop variation. I think the Dogwood Blossom itself will fit really well within the square. When I look at the top and the bottom, there’s a little bit of imbalance there on this diagonal, there’s a little bit of imbalance. I would like to accentuate the relationship between the headlight and the flower and also this very beautiful arching movement. So I could a square version, what we keep in there, and we came, add some more like this. That’s sort of what we ended up with, I would love to hear your thoughts about the whole critique today and just want to say, a huge thank you to Shelly for sharing such a beautiful story and beautiful image with us. I hope to see you again really soon on the Mindful Eye’s Daily Critique.