Hi everybody. This is Craig Tanner for The Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. Today image was submitted by Doug who’s an advance photographer from Washington State. Doug recently create this image on the Mindful Eyes Death Valley National Park Workshop. Doug used the medium to long telephoto to here to isolate a part of a bad lands in an area of Death Valley National Park called Golden Canyon and because we’re there with Doug, we know that Bob here who was the one who put this one in the Workshop is really the main subject of the image.

So, I want to start up talking about what I like about this image and then I want to spend a few minutes today, there’s not really anything on this image that I want to change. So the reason that I chose this image is I want to talk about the way that the average viewer is looking at printed media and how this path that the average viewer takes or wants to take ends up having a pretty big impact on the idea of visual designing in terms of whether the design of our image either creates a pleasing feeling for the viewer where there's a feeling that they can move through the image and a way that’s natural or feels unified or there is more of adjuring image for the viewer.

Obviously, both ways of creating images could be very important or very valid depending on what it is that you’re trying to communicate. When I look at this image, one of the things I love is how the quality of light is where can really working well for what Doug has trying to say. This real low side light is creating a lot of dimension and the subject of Bob himself is also creating at this angle, a really very beautiful shadow behind Bob.

So in addition to just the quality of light on Bob, the negative space of the shadow behind Bob helps him to come forward and separate. Not only that but the shape of the highlight and shadows here immediately sets up a really beautiful reputation or rhythm. If look at Bob shape, you’re really looking at a whole series of semi-circles both on a positive and negative space shapes here being suggested here. And then, you’ve got to highlight semi-circle here and this really beautiful angulating circles and that moves in a real dynamic way.

When you look at the quality of light and the rest of the image, you're seeing the same thing. Lighting that in one time creates dimension and separation of the subjects but also a lighting pattern with highlighting shadow where the shapes of highlights and shadows are rhyming in a very repetitious, over and over and over again in the image and that’s really beautiful.

I also love the simplicity of having two diagonals that I have a design that sort of carries you to the image in a consistent way that we’re those diagnose cross hatch. Most of your shading and high contrast happens along this diagonal and arcs a little bit off of the diagonal and then most of the highlight and open areas and are areas that are lower contrast happen on this diagonal.

And I just love the simplicity of that cross hatching. I also love the way Doug is working with a harmony of color here. You know if Bob was carrying let’s say a pack that was some very bright fluorescent color. Let’s say like a bright yellow, where his hat is bright green. Then the shot becomes an image of a backpack or a hat or some piece of apparel. But because the colors that Bob is wearing, really harmonize with this section of Golden Canyon. You get a really beautiful feeling of the light separating Bob but then colored design connecting Bob to everything else and that’s a really beautiful -- again rhythm or repetition or unity.

You’ve got obviously tan and a lot of tan back here. You have this red and then burnt red here. You have a little bit of this exposed skin that sort of more of an orange one color that gets harmonized here. And there's a color theory thing that’s happening here that I love that, that is a great way to work with a dynamic symmetry. And that is you get this really subtle sense and some of the shadow areas of a very muted sort of cyan.

And then it gets real concentrated right here in one small spot. Same thing with these very muted sort of burnt red. And then, it gets concentrated in the idea of the backpack. It’s really beautiful harmony of color, but at the same time within that harmony of color a very dynamic feeling of symmetry and dynamic balance.

This is the main thing that I want to talk about today. You know we’ve talk about the hierarchy of how the high goes first to the highest contrast then highlights then warm tones, then mid-tones, then cool tones. Shadow areas in detail and the minds keeps black with no detail.

There something else is going on. We’ve been trained for years and years and years in the west to read from left to right and we have been trained to go the top left and move to the right. And, we also know that it’s easier to move from up to down than it is to move from down to up. And we also know something else.

We know that because we start in the left, that all things being equal. Let’s say this is a totally grayed out rectangle or white rectangle or black rectangle. Even in that case, where everything within the rectangle is the same. We know that the left hand side particularly the top left, and then followed by the left middle in the lower left. This side, with all things being equal has a lot more weight than the right side, because this is where we go. And that ends up potentially being very important.

If we want to create a scenario for the viewer that is familiar and feels like it's easy for them to move around and is unified with the way they typically look at printed media on a page. In this image, it’s just a classic example of an image that has been arranged to facilitate that movement.

When you go to the top left here, all of these lines start to move down which is easy movement and they move quite a ways to the image before they are interrupted. And then, once this movement does get interrupted, you have this really high contrast shadow that starts to move us back around and Bob himself moves us back around in a very powerful way from all this image.

If we’re going to move in a circle in the west looking at something, it’s much easier for us to go clockwise than it is for us to go this way around. And boy is this image have a very strong sense of design that can pull you back around this way.

Here something else is true that we really don’t think about that much when it comes to design. If the left hand side of the page is inherently more weighty and more visually powerful than the right hand side, then it follows that it’s kind of be more typically more pleasing for their viewer to take a very small, very high weighted visual subject. And boy, does Bob in this image have a lot of visual weights, high contrast.

One of the highest contrast here is the images right here and also just psychological impact of the archetype of the human being and the shot. It works very well to take Bob and put him far out on the right side and then leveraged him in a very dynamic way against the inherently very powerful left hand side of the page.

So there’s so many things that are working congruent with this movement that we know about the way people naturally want to move their images. What’s interesting is that this is an image because of that, wherein you flip it for the vast majority of people. If they get a choice between this version and this version, this version is not going to work as well for most people.

You can see in this scenario that if you go to the top left, you get stuck in a box that takes you in directions you don’t want to go backwards or up, easier to go down. You immediately get to a real strong block without much on the other side of it and all up in here that can carry you past. This is just a scenario of image that can really trap the odd, based on the way we typically move through an image.

In this case, all of the high value subjects are over here on the left, apart of the image that already has a lot of visual weight which can really start to tend to keep the viewer over here. You just don’t want to go out here as much in this image and so, this idea of the portrait of the super environment down on the portrait of the photographer looking out in the scene doesn’t play as well here, because it’s harder to get out into these spaces, based on the things that we’ve already mentioned.

And, instead of this line, I’m sorry about that, I’m not going to re-record this. So this is a vertical version you are now seeing that we weren't going to look at, so let’s go back here. Instead of this line bringing you around in the image in a way that’s clockwise which is the way we typically like to move, it brings you counterclockwise and so as Bob.

We’d love to hear your feedback about these ideas and were we wanted to finished up saying here is, this is my attitude about design. My attitude about design is obviously, I believe this or I wouldn’t teach it. Most days of the week on the Mindful Eye, it’s a knowing these things and being conscious of them that gives us the opportunity to be in the driver sit as an artist. It’s talking about them, and then we can decide when we want to make it easy for the viewer.

Maybe when we want to make it adjuring for the viewer, or when we want to throw all these things out in the window. It also can really help us to understand why some images are working over others. And one of the things that I do that I really encourage you to do that can help you see a lot of these things. Just take every image that you like enough to work on and to flip it and see how you feel about the image as you flip it back and forth. I can teach you a lot of kind of movement that we talked about today.

Big thank you to Doug for submitting this beautiful image. Big thank you to all the people who participate in our Death Valley National Park Workshop. We had a blast, we’d love to see you on Mindful Eye workshop and big thank you to you for being here on the Mindful Eye Daily Critique. Hope to see you again real soon.