How to Create Rhythm within Imagery

Hi, everybody. This is Craig Tanner for the Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. Today’s image was submitted by George. He is an advanced photographer. We don’t have the metadata here but we do have the back story. George recently created this image on the Mindful Eye’s Zion National Park Workshop.

One of the first things I want to mention about the image relative to the back story is that George shot this image on the way to the “Court” location for an afternoon assignment. It can be so easy and particularly he is a landscape photographer that get in to the habit of picking a place on the map or on the park and then loading all of your gear into a pack, and think that you’re being a sort of very productive and doing right work by putting your head down and quickly getting there. And to me, that’s sort of the antithesis that’s exhibiting one of the hallmarks of a creative person.

All of your great shots, all the shots that you had the most fun making, all the shots that resonate with other people the most, they all had one thing in common, and that is first you said alright now is the point where I'm going to actually be a photographer. Now is the point where I'm going to engage the creative process and just cultivating a habit in an out to where you give yourself permission more and more often to just get going a very, very powerful way to become more creative.

When I look at this image from the design stand point, it’s a real classic in terms of having a main subject of this rock. And then as you include other things, where George is lengthwise in the framing the other things of forming a visual unity or harmony with the main idea in here a row classical shot in terms of rhythm, main idea rock and the shape, and then this shape in a whole variety of ways ends up playing out almost everywhere in the image. It’s in the shape of a pool, the rock is setting in, it’s in this flow pattern we had ran on the first day of the workshop and this washed pattern on a mud and a canyon floor is obviously running the main idea on the variety of ways. Beautiful how that transitions into the reflection of the pebble sky that not only rhymes the main idea from a shape stand point that rhymes the pattern in the mud and then it harmonizes the color of the rock.

And speaking of the color, they’re really beautiful image in terms of a sort of washed kind of paint early color pair of blue and orange. And then the background of the image and now the same shape plays out, the overall shape of the pool back here rhyme is the main idea. This rock is more angular that still hits rhyming where these triangular kind of discs shape the idea. This is the same shape, and this is a same shape on the image.

When I look at this image the one area, there are question a little bit. I love this image so much. I love it when I saw it in the workshop, is this area back here. There’s a lot of dynamic symmetry that plays out, but if you just look at the different zones of this image. And then if you go back and forth here and here, just to shape at the rock itself, very symmetrical, big symmetry over here just on the side.

And then back here on the background, if I look from side to side, this is where the different. And if I move from corner to corner, there is a difference for me in terms of texture and pattern, and this to me is more rhythmic moving in this direction.

And this is one of the area that I think about changing, but before I change it, if I'm thinking about editing an image in addition to just balance and color and line and positive and negative space, applied visual energy in pathway all these things. The other level that I’ll think about if I'm starting to edit an image is what sort of archetype does this image represents. And if the archetype represented is more abstract, or starts to push towards the surreal then that a lot of times will frame me up in my mind to make changes that sort of going in that direction.

And because George does not include the sky here, and he’s shooting down, and this could sort of be a canyon anywhere because of the colors are already a little bit pane early and something else. There’s a really powerful archetype. For me that’s your prehistory in the lower part of the image. This to me is sort of the scale shapes on a lizard and all these patterns start to actually make me think. It’s a sort of armor on a dinosaur and so I start to think you know, there’s something about this. It’s so abstract and prehistoric. I might start to push this more towards the surreal type of image and one of the ways that we can create this surreal feeling, this woman in the old days of the photographer to this is the hard way using the multiple enlargers jam pack up and juniors like a temporary photography does this a lot.

Let’s take a part of the image and then flip it and duplicate it. And I create this obvious sort of surreal pattern particularly where the two sides meet out. And so I did this in this image to create more of the symmetrical balance in the background and then it creates the sort of surreal idea in here. It’s a kind of an archetype of the face or lots of other archetypes in here sort of eyes. And these shapes in here also play off of the main idea. And now, these two ideas play off of each other in a way that’s balance.

And you know from there, I just had fun with this image. I’ll start to push it more and more towards this surreal. I have it with a lot blue, I pop little contrast using a curves adjustment that came in the levels, and make that even more dramatic then I have it at low end, just kind of continuing to push the drama. And then when I got here, what I thought of was while this would be a really cool image to look at in black and white. There’s so much form. This is so graphic. It’s so simple from a color standpoint and real quick, it’s just fun to think about the theory of the black and white adjustment layer. And then we could see that we basically had blues and kind of oranges.

And I think about oranges, it’s going to have red and yellow and magenta in it, and some aspect of that because blues are going to have cyans and blues. The only color that we really didn’t have on the image was anything that was close to green so it’s no surprise that when we move the green slider, nothing really happens but if we start to move the red slider, there’s a kind of the lot that’s going to happen. That could be very dramatically if we move the yellow slider, same thing. And we’ve come in and we move the blue and the cyan slider, the same kind of thing.

We could start to push towards a really dramatic interpretation of this image just based on playing around with the sliders and the black and white adjustment layer. So that’s just something else to think about relative to this image.

Let’s back up and go all the way back to the beginning in George’s image and there’s the reason why I'm doing this slow way. I know there’s much faster way to do it. But you are about to see why didn’t you do it in the fast way.

One of the things that I want to mention I a real quick here is the end of the idea of implied visual pathways and energy. This is an image where once I've created this image during the background, I thought about what happens if I flip this foreground part and so I did. And it’s amazing how at least to my eye it will be interesting to hear from other people how to balance this.

And so the other last take away from this today is and this is more advanced from a composition standpoint. It’s not just the shapes. It’s not just the way that it separated on to separate it. It’s not positive and negative space shape. It’s not just rhythm and a lot of basic things that we talk about. Something else that encourages you to start looking at in your images is how dominant subject like this, a high contrast subject that implies a visual pathway, how much effect that can have on, how we compose things.

It’s interesting in this image how when we flip it like that a big part of the reason why it doesn’t work is because this energy gets black, and because this pushes in this direction in this high contrast, it needs things over here to balance that push to be fair. These two high contrast ideas over here are very, very visually powerful, and they need things over here to be balance. We’re just thinking about implied visual energy coming out of high contrast subjects. It doesn’t have to be aligned there but a lot of times it helps to have a space there for that energy and to play out in the image.

And I want to say a big thank you to George for submitting a beautiful image. I want to say a big thank you to all the people who participated in the Zion National Park Workshop and I’ll say big thank you to you for being here, and I hope to see tomorrow on the Daily Critique.