Hi, everybody this is Craig Tanner for The Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. Today’s image was submitted by Charles who’s an intermediate photographer from Indiana. Charles shot this with Nikon D80 and a 50 mm f1.8 lens. And Charles ays, this is portrait of his girlfriend that he took right before it started to rain. He said, he was really enjoying the overcast light that he was getting here and he says in Photoshop, he brought the colors up here to make this more exciting from a color standpoint.

So, let’s get right into the critique today. I agree with you Charles about the quality of light and I’m really enjoying it. Particularly for this portrait subject, a large soft, wrap around light source. You can work really well in a general sense for two types of portrait subjects. One is people that have a really beautiful face like Charles girlfriend. The soft wrap around light source basically reveals all the features of the face and a lot of times if we’re working with that kind of light source, we’ll call it beauty lighting and we’ll get the light up just a little bit higher than the center of the eyes and we’ll end up with some drop shadows, very subtle drop shadows. Just below the features of the face so that there’s some dimension that the light is pretty much hitting everywhere and we’re sort of showing a very beautiful face.

Another sort of archetype in terms of a portrait subject that can work really well with beauty lighting is a portrait subject that has deep sad eyes and very dramatic features, having a soft wrap around light source and a light source that sort of coming straight in and hitting everywhere can get us away from having heaviness on the eyes.

Something else that I’ll mention here is Charle’s girlfriend is looking up slightly and that’s really helping here. Even on an overcast a day where you might think, well, I’m going to have this nice pleasing light that’s going to be everywhere in the portraits subject’s face. This guy is very high to low. In terms of being a light source relative to our portrait subject and we can still end up with eye sockets that don’t have a catch lights or much light at all even on an overcast tape., particularly if the surroundings of the portrait subject for doing this outside or darker. Looking up can really help to create a catch light, get more light in the eyes, looking up can do a lot of other things for portraits.

Just depending on what we’re trying to say, looking up tends to empower people. We have a lot of memory in our body subconscious so just body positions can start to drive emotional states looking up makes us feel empowered, feel more positive and looking up stretches the mask of the face, tends to make people look younger and if we’re shooting that eye level or higher than eye level, looking up will make the eyes up here much bigger and the portrait which can be placed in, depending again, on what your trying to say with your portrait.

One of the other things I love about this image is color. I love the richness of color. One of the things that’s driving richness of color is the richness of the low and high end of the file. When you look at these histograms, you know we’ve gotten all caught up and histograms that look like this. We have detail everywhere which is boring most of the time. Your light not only has a true black point or true white point. He’s got quite a few pixels there, totally clipped the black and then quite a few pixels are very near to black and this area or areas where you have this real powerful sense of black, really helps to anchor the image and gives the image quite a bit of depth. The other that’s beautiful is that when you get to these areas that are black, there’s no color cast there. It’s not blue-black or red-black., it is black-black and that’s true of the white in here and when you have that cleanness of a gray or true white or true black, it can really start to help the colors that do exist in the image to separate a lot more and create a lot greater feeling of depth.

The other thing that’s obvious about this image is just the gesture and the prop. It’s a very fun image. It’s potentially a very evocative image, it’s very sensuous image and that’s really powerful. It’s also a really strong sense of the circles that keep repeating just the way the hair flying out here on the face, the – back here, the eyes are so strong here even the nose, the gesture with the lips, the overall mask of the face and then you have a couple of negative space shapes, that’s where it balances each other. These is an images that are working really well just from a shape and quality of line and sort of rhythm standpoint.

Here is one of the main reasons why I picked this image, so far, I just said a bunch of things that I like and I like this portrait quite a bit. I really just wanted to talk about a variation of this image but in doing that, I wanted to talk about something that you might try when you’re shooting people. It might really start to open up a whole new world of possibilities. It might start to help you in your mind’s eye to start to see more possibilities and just walking out and doing what we can tend to do which is here’s our camera and just shoot with the horizon being leveled here just that in the level right into people.

Here’s something you might try. You might try shooting a whole series of sketch shots, it’s really quick right when you approach somebody or in this case, if it’s somebody that you know when you’re just working on a portrait and here’s what I’m talking about. You might shoot them quick from low to high from high to low, having them sort of stand still and then walking around them on an art, so you start shooting waiting towards the left hand side of the face that on and then coming all the way around to the right hand side of the face and then you might try this. You might try having them sort of standing in the environment where your going to take the picture and take the camera and move it on an arc, so that it starts off level with the horizon and then you move it on arc to the right, so that it starts to become oblique to the horizon.

This portrait subject is not moving and you’re just moving your camera so that you’re creating a tilted angle in the cinema world, we call this a Dutch angle. You just now, moving on an arc where you start of the level and you’re going both directions into the right and into the left, now shooting a oblique angles and look at all of those and you might really start to learn quite a bit about the angle of the camera lights relative to portrait subject in terms of which side if their face. Do they like to be shot high to low or low to high and taking these tilted oblique angles can do all kinds of things for us and that’s one of the main things that I wanted to talk about today.

When I look at this image as much as I like it, a couple of things are true for me after I sort of spend some time with it. One is that, the body language of the tilt is a little bit incongruent with the sort of evocative sensuous nature of the set up with the prop and the gesture. And what I mean by that is, when the head is tilted like this off to the side a little bit. It’s sort of a warm opening to someone. Something that’s more evocative and potentially more challenging from the level being sensuous as if somebody is looking right out at us. That’s what we tend to do when we’re very attracted to somebody. It’s a very similar body language one—very interesting. This one surprises anybody, similar body language actually threatened by someone.

We tend to sort of square up and look right at them and so this body language is a little bit incongruently just of this whole concept and the other thing that’s happening is that the viewer is going to tend to want to start up here and move in this direction and right now, you sort off hit a wall. The prop of the lollipop is so straight up and down that it almost sets up this visual wall that’s hard to move into. Something else is true. There’s more of a feeling of movement on this diagonal, but we want to start here and what happens is I have to come over and then move in a very unnatural way to sort of follow the energy of the image.

If we took a Dutch angle here or tilted angle, we can end up with something like this. I’m not saying that its better but one of the things that I’d really like for you to think about is when I do this tilt, I want you to sort of just pay attention to how you feel. Just what is the different feeling that you get when you see the orientation like this versus like this, very, very different? I’m not saying its better, I’m just saying it’s different and by taking this quick series of sketches with your camera, you can either find these things within your sketches as you’re going to look at the images but what it’s going to do is just kind to help you pre-visualize these things. See for me, when I look at these, several different things happened.

Now, this is a lot more evocative because the eyes and the gesture with the mouth, this is all straight into us, but the prop has a really strong angle like this. The easiest direction for us to move in an images, top left to bottom right and you get a really strong sense to that diagonal because the orientation of the nose now and the feeling of line moving through here on a diagonal, you also get a sense of cross section diagonals which can really help the viewer move all the way around in the image and get feeling of doubt. You really get a strong sense of that now and something else is true about this image now and that is this is now the thing that is open and inviting and to me, that is more congruent with this concept of it being the sort of connection that’s suggesting something that’s very evocative or very sensuous.

Again, that was just my opinion, so I’d love to hear your feedback about that and remember, this wasn’t about this being a better shot more than anything. It was about this idea of sketching and shooting these different shots and saying if that might help you become a better portrait photographer, really beautiful portrait from you Charles. I want o say big thank you to him for sharing it with us on Mindful Eye Daily Critique.