Hi every body, this is Craig Tanner for the Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. Today’s image was submitted by Eduardo who’s a professional photographer from Mexico. He water shot this with an 18 to 35 zoom at 18 millimeters. We don’t know the camera body here from looking at those, but this isn’t seemed like there’s a lot of perspective distortion particularly on the edges. My guess is that this was shot on crop factor camera so the effect of focal length to sort of semi wide where you wouldn’t have quite so much perspective distortion from the super wide lens. He water shot this at F8 of the 750th of a second.

This was taken in Cuba. Eduardo said where he lives in Mexico had a cultural exchange with this city in Cuba. Where he said he loved this plaza and he’s really motivated to take this shot, when he saw the kids walking by and boy, I love that part of the image. These are really cool images, a beautiful space, it’s a very challenging situation. You’ve got this really hard next light, bright light back here, plaza’s in the shade, you see a big group of people that are interesting and you want quick and try to take a picture. Very, very challenging and I think Eduardo has created a really beautiful documentary photograph.

One of the things that I really like about this image is the way the main subject doing to me, that’s the group of the kids. The way they’re situated in the space, they’re doing a pretty good job of separating, in terms of the way Eduardo’s left negative space at the bottom and is left a little bit of negative space over the top of their heads before we get to the façade of the buildings on the opposite side of the plaza.

The other thing that’s neat is the framing from left to right, with these architectural details, the spheres. They’re really beautiful of job of rhyming. The idea of individual kids and groupings of kids and then just the design of the buildings in the background with all these archways, that does a really beautiful job of immediately coming back in and rhyming the idea of the groupings of the kids.

And then in the negative space of the sky, the clouds were doing the same things. So even though this is a complicated image, there are a lot of things that are working together to help simplify. The other thing that’s true is that the design of the buildings and then just the brick work or the tower works in the plaza, that’s a really nice rhythm. Also, I like the way the negative space at the bottom is balanced and the negative space at the top where Eduardo’s going up over the top of the buildings. I love the fact that this is in black and white. To me it’s psychologically congruent with the space; this seems more like an all war space. I think it also help in to simplify this, it’s just, anytime there’s a real challenge sort of hard mixed quality of light, other times black and white. It is a lot better choice.

Then coloring was so much going on here, it’s sort of easy to imagine that the black and white is just helping to simplify this in terms of cutting down and even more ideas than we already have. Another thing that’s really neat is jus the moment. You know you’ve got, a lot of these kids where there’s a really cool sort of rhythm. These guys are in lock step they’re and lock step, they’re in lock step, there’s a real nice sort of unity that’s happening. And there’s also a really powerful feeling in this image of Eduardo, sort of being the fly on the wall and this is just real life and he’s seeing it and this is a school of thought and documentary photography that’s very powerful. It’s just the center of everything, the fly on the wall and I get a sense of that like this is a classic photograph.

It’s hard to talk about perfect world improvement for a shot like this. You know, pulling off with Eduardo has already pulled off it’s just so difficult in a situation like this. It’s easy to imagine, I don’t know for sure that Eduardo has no connection to these people, but they don’t even know he’s taking the picture.

So, please take the perfect world stuff here with a green itself, but may be in some of these suggestions they’ll give you some things to think about if you’re out shooting loose on the street. When I think about one of the change things you know, there are sort of two areas that I wish that we could change. One is right here, with the adult walking with the kids. I wish that there was some way to ask her to hold up and you just have the kids walking through. There’s a psychological tangent scene here where we’ve got the kids and that’s a really powerful archetype and all of a sudden, you have the adult and she’s sort of closest to the camera and she’s starting to appear very big, to me that takes away from what may have been more powerful simple idea with just the kids.

And then there’s also a physical tendency where she’s sort of connected to this kid, almost connected with these kids, she is right there with the heel. This guy’s sort of interesting, it’d be cool if he was out in here may be, but they’re forming a tendency and a perspective where she’s closer, she looks like a giant relative to him, it’s like one of those photographic tricks or something where you put your hand out and the person’s in your hand.

And this guy is really interesting, I love his energy as a counterpoint to everything, but I would love it if he was over here. This whole area, she comes up and she gets on the façade of the building and that’s not happening out here. This whole sort of grouping right here gets really heavy to complicate things even more. This is 35 millimeter rectangle and the center of this energy is almost dead on the third which is a very powerful point in terms of the design of the framing device of the image being a symmetric and creating a unity possibility of placing your subject at that point in the image.

There’s another area too that inappropriate for perfect world, so we change or shall we take this kid, put her in front and the tall kid in the back, so that you didn’t have this tendency and you have the energy of the kids kind of moving down to the spheres like this.

Whenever I have an area of an image that feels challenged to me and it’s close it all to the edge, then I’ll start to think about a crop and this is just a variation that I might think about here if I wanted to simplify this and make it more graphic and I’m not saying that we need to it’s a really classic documentary shot. I could see you coming over somewhere like this just to the back of those kids shoes and just simplifying it. Just having the kids that does cut down on the longer line of the kids and that was really nice as a counterpoint to the back of the shot. But now the back of the shot it shorter, you also don’t have this area over here now that can kind of pull you up into a flat spaceship even though the clouds are really nice moving this back end on a minor diagonal.

If I crop here then I would think about doing some Photoshop work to make the kids come forward. So let’s go to layers, I’ve kept those hidden today to try to make the critique a little bit more interesting. I’m going to do that from now on, unless everybody tells me, they hate that idea. Kim and I did a curve’s adjustment and I really created a lighting effect to make it look like there is direct light hitting in the plaza just behind the kids. This is one really cool thing about black and white. You can make a huge radical change to value and you get away with it and if this was a color file, you’d never get away with this. It just wouldn’t look right no matter how you did it. I’d be very, very difficult to pull this off and color to make that bit of a change and then I’d come in and darken the sky and in then sort of go high contrast even more to really kind of make this more graphic. I’m trying to just make it more about the kids. This is where we started on this version and this is sort of where we ended up.

I just want to make a point here, if you look at my mask, you won’t see any hard edges, let me make that go away really quick, a little keyboard shortcut just happened to me that I didn’t want to happen. And there you see another mask where everything is very, very soft, and so I just wanted to mention that if you knew to the Daily Critique, when I’m editing on a mask to make changes like this, I almost always had zero hardness on the brush and I work at very low opacities and build them up, 30% is almost as high as I would ever go and if I’m working at 100 % going really critical work, a lot of times my opacity would be starting at somewhere around 10 % and I would build up from there. I just wanted to mention that say something else, there’s way too much Photoshop information in the world you guys.

I’m increasingly frustrated with people saying, forget Photoshop, it’s too complicated, you know, I want to just try and get it right in camera. Finishing your image is always been a part of photography, it’s a big part of tradition of photography, Photoshop gives us more control than ever and fortunate thing is for, and this is not against anybody at all. There’s a lot of great Photoshop information, there’s a big problem and it can do a lot of things. Before, a lot of people and again, I’m not talking about a specific person, please hear me say that. This is not against anybody, there’s nobody that teaches Photoshop that I have an issue with, but there’s a lot of publishing empires that have been built around teaching people Photoshop and information is getting stacked on top of information on top of information and a vast majority of it is over kill.

When people tell me about Photoshop being so complicated, I think if all you learn was just the adjustment layers and how to manipulate a mask without showing your hand, you can do almost everything you would ever need to do in a very beautiful controlled way and then Photoshop is very simple. It’s just something I’d encourage you to think about. You know when people say, Craig what’s the two bigger shortcuts to becoming a better photographer? I say learn everything you can about light and lighting and become very, very good at editing your images in the darkroom. These are two of the biggest things you can do both have a lot respect to technical things.

Anyhow, I love the image, absolutely love, love, love this image from Eduardo. It’s old school. It’s classic. I love the energy of the kids. The fact that Eduardo, just, almost just in a mode where he just has to make a snap decision about this, just pulled off a stunning composition, beautiful shot. I want to say a big thank you to Eduardo for submitting this to the Mindful Eye’s Daily Critique. See you soon everybody.