How to Create Image Rhythm and Balance Part 2/2

I like a lot on a lot of different levels. I love the moment here and I love the graphic quality of this. I love the way the subject is separating from the background even though the background has quite a bit going on back there. This one was created by Ramon. He is an intermediate photographer. He says he took this picture in the summer when he went with his kids to the local swimming pool and he notices Sam is playing with his friends and they were moving their heads backwards and creating some great shapes with the water drops. He says he was just trying to capture the moment. He shot this with a 70-200 zoom lens, shot it wide open. This is an F4 ISL series Canon lens. He shot wide open with F4 and exposed the file for 500th of a second. It’s a great thing to know here in terms of the focal length and freezing the water like this. The effective focal length was a 160 mm. I don’t know the camera body.

I love the moment and the quality of light here is what’s really helping this shot work. This real strong side light is not only creating specularity on the water droplets, it’s helping to separate that from the background and the background there looks like maybe whatever this is, maybe it’s more either in the shade or just a darker subject but you get this real strong side lighting sort of realm light effect on the boy and that lighting with the real bright here and then much darker back here is mimicking what’s happening with one of the main subjects which is the water droplets.

Something else is interesting to me about this image is these two lines. They could in any other situation just become overwhelming but in this case because of the arms. To me, they’re real neat balancing element in the top of the frame that rhymes a big part of the main subject. There’s a shape back here that’s sort of interesting, almost looks like a human figure. There are a lot of really beautiful tones in this image. I mean I love high contrast and there are just a lot of rich tones. I don’t really ever get to anywhere in this image or if I feel like there’s muddy gray. I feel like there’s always movement of tone even in areas that do go closed to a true medium. You still have a really beautiful local contrast even out of focus areas.

The two things about this that I wish I could change, I think I might just clone out whatever that is and really sort of let these lines in the image play a little bit more and the way I wish that this was when we’re on a mountain cave and make two shots real quick and going to put them together and made a square pan. No, I know that’s an oxymoron but you get my point. I wish we could see the information that Dennis is essentially out here so that this could complete a little bit more and then the hand would maybe even come out and almost touch this point where the water droplets continue. I mean you have essentially a golden spiral here and we talked about the golden mean and the golden spiral. You have one here and there’s such a strong implication of energy from both the arm and the water droplets and it does make me think unfortunately a little bit what’s out here but its just so dramatic and such a great moment that it’s an amazing image.

Anyway, for me just a really great job of using quality of light and focal length the moment to capture a really neat image. A real powerful landscape shot here and this image was submitted by Ned who is an intermediate photographer. Ned says he was at the old fishing pier, Wrightsville Beach in North Carolina right before sunrise and took this picture. He used a Nikon D300 at 10 mm lens, very, very wide lens here and I love the quality of line. In big scenic landscapes leading line can play a huge part and you have this outrageous leading line that’s working on one of the major diagonals here and that leads out to one of the other main subjects or if not the main subject the pier and the image has several other very, very powerful, simple moving lines and these ideas play off of each other in a way that’s a really beautiful sort of leading out, creating a space shape in here and then coming across. It’s kind of moving us all the way through the whole image, just in a big simple V zigzag shape.

There are some really beautiful rhythms in this image. There’s a rhythm of series of triangles, they’re setting up. It’s really beautiful. This one is super up two’s along with this one. They’re still there. There is a really beautiful, marvel the feeling in the clouds that plays off of the leading edge of the line here. The white clouds and the leading edge of the wave and the other thing that I'm enjoying is the way the negative space up here in this negative space is book ending but then it’s dynamic with this being smooth and this having all these texture. This really powerful feeling of texture is interesting how there’s texture change all along in here and that helps to create depth in the image.

A beautiful color blue and orange are really awesome, the color complement. I love seeing almost a pure white here and pure black. I love how close Ned got. I mean the camera must almost be touching the ground here and this really making the foreground palpable. I do wish I could change a couple of things on this one. I’d love to see a variation where the water may be kind of came even a little up over in this area or this whole line kind of moves in a real dramatic way and breaks this negative spaces up, maybe a little bit more. I don’t know if that would work but I’d like to see a variation like that and I’d love to come in and create a little bit of a different gradient back here. This may just be the way the sky was naturally in terms of the brightest part of the sky, it almost looks like a halo effect over the pier and I’d love to even that out and change the gradient a little bit.

A really stunningly beautiful, very engaging, inviting landscape image and we’re going to wrap up with this image. This image was submitted by Nigel and Nigel is an advanced photographer from Australia. There’s a pretty long back story in this one so I'm just going to give you the short version of it.

Nigel got some information about a waterfall that was supposed to be incredible and he spend a ton of time getting there and it turned out it was like a foot tall coming over a rock. That kind of put him into a dark place from a creative standpoint and then he just kind of snapped out of that and decided to go with it. He said after getting over that, this whole experience worth it and I cannot agree more. Nigel shot this with a Canon 350D, used a 135 mm focal length and exposed the file using ISO 100 stopping down to F16 for 8 seconds and intentionally under exposed this by two stops.

That’s one of the things I love about this image is it’s a low key image which means the image is keyed to black. We don’t see much of this anymore. With digital, we’ve become so overwhelmed or fascinated or butt into the idea of getting detail everywhere. It can really make your photography boring and the next step creativity workshops, one of the things we say to people is if you wanted to just go out and be creative in the most basic of way for the next 30 minutes or 50 minutes over expose everything that you shoot by three or four stops and then take another 15 minutes and under expose everything you shoot by three or four stops.

You may be just amazed to what happens in some of these shots. How some things start to get isolated, how mood changes, how you can just abstract with exposure, and this image in some respects is very simple but as I’ve said that as a complement, it’s very elegant. It’s just working off with of one of the major diagonals and this really beautiful S-curve. You have this really beautiful feeling under exposed here, almost like moonlight. This really beautiful sort of spotlight effect on these rocks creating a lot of dimension and form in the rocks and then it just kind of tells off in the mystery but there’s detail. It’s very, very subtle but there’s detail up in these areas.

And I love the detail here of the fern. The fern is such an ancient plant. With this basically being under exposed and just this moving water that can be anywhere, not only could this be anywhere on the planet, it could also be anytime. You can just imagine this almost being some prehistoric photograph that’s somehow been recorded. I just love the way that my mood is so deeply affected by the low key feeling here and the feeling of a mystery and then that combined with simplicity and then with the fern, and with the monochrome. It’s just a very, very powerful image. I love to see a whole series of images like this from Nigel. This is one of the images to me, a beginning of an incredible portfolio that would make an amazing show.

I just want say a big thank you to all of the photographers who submitted this really sort of beautiful gallery of images and I want to say another huge thank you to all of you for being a part of The Mindful Eye and we will see you tomorrow everybody. Have a great holiday weekend.