Hi everybody, this is Craig Tanner for the Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. Today’s image was submitted by Robert who is an advanced photographer from Missouri. Robert says that he took image with a Nikon D300, 12 to 24 zoom and at F16 at ISO 200 expose the file for 10th of a second. This was taken at Olympic National Park, Robert said that one of the things he really dreamt to the scene was just the fact that the boat looked like that it just been left there. So just sort of asking a question about why the boat wasn’t tide up and who had just been in the boat and I definitely get the sense of that kind of story out from the picture. He arranged a techno question too in his back story about HDR extending dynamic range in the picture he says because the moving water and the moving clouds, he was sort of afraid to do in camera multiple brackets and then blend those. So what he did was he took the exposure that already described and then converted multiple images out of the RAW converter and then used and HDR program and created what he calls a quasi-HDR and I think that’s a good description. HDR is High Dynamic Range and when we say HDR to people that know what it is, those images tend to have, because of the super extended dynamic range kind of have a surreal look to them, almost like illustration and this just looks more like an image with, was taken with a splinter density filter or something that is actually a closer approximation to what the eye would see. Because our eye sees very long dynamic range about 12 stops and the camera, you know whether it’s digital or film can only deal with the range of about 5 to 6 or 7 stops depending on or the film camera fusion slider color negative. And one of the questions he had was, did this work? I think it did, when I look at this, I don’t get a sense of anything strange as far as HDR or something that’s been over processed. I think it’s a really good example of the power of RAW and how if you get a pretty good exposure sort of a compromise exposure in the scene that has a lot of dynamic range of how far we could go with multiple RAW conversions and being able to change the exposure after the facts. So well the part of the back story, let’s get right into the critique. The other that I liked about this image is I just like the way that I move around in the image, as far as a winding old shot, you know I have a real simple way for myself to come into the image.

The boat is the subject, really gets my eye, it exist in a really sun negative space here so I can move around it, I can go out to the dock and then that leads me out to the mountains. And once I get to the mountains, I have the clouds right here with a negative space above them. So in other words, it was really, a real nice way to move all the way through the image and come back. There are some really nice diagonals here, even though Robert is shooting straight into the horizon. Here you have other diagonals in the scene that give it great sense depth. The boat though, the idea that the boat is turned here to the water, is really nice in terms of the shoreline being here straight across and right here with the light meets the mountains being straight across. This helps to break up that feeling of things flattening out or sort of being trapped in space shapes that are square, rectangular and sort of reminding us that this is a flat media that we’re looking at. This diagonals really help to move us pass those places that are flat lines and obviously breaking a line is a big deal and that really helps tune the dock as doing that out here. So this is something to really think about, you know in shots where you end up with this real hard line unless there is some implied movement from one subject below the to above the line to get us to move pass at this kinds of just straight end horizons in the shot or even vertical lines and a shot that run parallel to the edge of the frame can be really sticking point. Some really neat color going on here, it’s interesting.

You got the blue and orange color compliment up here then you have this pretty really wild color complimentary pair instead of primary green and primary red. You have yellow green and yellow red, is almost perfect color compliments. These sort of almost neon colors or posterized colors and that’s where I kind of want to start board the critique because for me, as much as this composition really works for me in a lot levels from a color’s stand point, it’s like two different pictures. This is such a wild color complimentary pair, the colors are so vibrant and instead of being sort of these natural colors, like pure green and pure red that we’re used to seeing in nature. This is more like something you see at a fashion show or on a poster and so it really takes on a lot of visual weights. Psychologically, for me it’s the viewer, because instead of being a color that’s connected to nature, and blue and orange are big time. This is one of the most prevalent, complimentary color pairs that we see in nature. Because of the colors of light, on partly cloudy to clear days, almost everyday of life, whether we ever know everything about color theory or not, we’re seeing blue and orange as a color complimentary pair. When you see it in all kinds of other situations too, just the one light looking in the end of the day versus the cool light in the shadows, it’s right there. We see it all of the time and this is one that we don’t see much at all in nature if ever. And so not only do you have two complimentary color pairs competing with each other, you have two ideas that are psychologically very different. So as much as colors in different part of the scenes were exciting, overall to me the colors are not going together well here. And the other thing that I think about big time when we start looking at shots that represent archetypes that are classical, that we’ve seen a lot, Robert’s done such a beautiful job here of composing something that’s very classical. Just in terms of a place when the boat and the things that I’ve already talked about. When I start to look at a shot like that, it’s almost like the difference between formal symmetry and dynamic symmetry. It’s like if I start to get close to formal symmetry then I go for it. Unless I’m trying to create a lot of tension for the viewer and I’m hardly ever trying to do that. That’s just not where I’m coming from. You know, I like to venture into things that are sort of out there on the edge but my sensibilities are more towards pop sensibilities. And my sensibilities are more towards things that everybody can appreciate, whether they’re appreciating it because culturally, it’s liked a lot by everybody but more often than not, it has more to do with just the idea of things that we share in common that are connected to some kind of a natural law that are already hold us together.

And thinking about that, when I look at an image like this and it’s close to being this classical design, I really start to look at balance from top to bottom and balance from corner to corner and side to side. And what happens for me when I think about that in these different subjects, you have one real dominant subject that’s very visually exciting and in the area that around it is super visually simple. One field of information here just to pattern of rocks and behind the boat, you know the simple pattern of information, texture of the water. Up here, we have simple field of information within two subjects, in the second subject is over here on the side of the image where there’s an enormous amount of visual weight. The left hand part of the frame is heavier than the right hand of the frame because of the way we read and the way you’ve been trained to look at media before or anything happens in this frame. Now we add this second cloud that has a lot of movement, we have the mountains balanced by this but we have this, it’s not balanced by anything over here. And now we have the boat moving in this direction and the majority of the boat is on this side of the frame. And so for me this starts to do two things, it starts to tip me out of the image over here and also makes the top very incongruent with the bottom. And so this is an image where I like it so much and if you’re open to change in editorial content, the first thing I do is just get rid of the color. I like this a 100 times better than black and white. And then once I get of rid of the color, then I get rid of that second cloud and now I have something that’s very lyrical from top to bottom and very balanced and much more simple.

And then you know from here I just made some changes, levels and curves to tighten those, perhaps even more I like hot contrast and just sort of push it. I’ve been more of a graphical direction because the boat to me is so graphical to begin with. Within the grays there’s still low flat here, I could keep working on this. But this is where we started, and this is where we ended up. And for me this feels a lot more connected from top to bottom. I would love to hear what other people would have to say about it. I just want to show you one other thing, when it comes to getting rid of a cloud like that, there are all different kinds of ways to do it. I’ve done it pretty quick so there’s still a little bit of a rough feeling to it, but if you didn’t know what I’ve done before and I’ve worked on this a little bit more. We turned it very big, we’d be know what to tell what I’ve done. And it involves, coming in to the clone stamp and healing in the area by using an opacity of 10 % and sampling an area here in the image that sort of homogenous and then stamping over the part you want to get rid of over again and that’s what I did here to get rid of that cloud. So I just wanted to mention that clone stamp, grabbing an area that simple and then cloning over an area that in the image that need to go away and if you didn’t have this sampelary, you could go another image and bring in a chunk of that image on a layer and just use it as a cloning palette to clone out of. Just as long as the tone or the colors or whatever are pretty close and then heal that area of damage out. Alright, I really want to say a huge thank you to Lewis, this is a stunning image, I really appreciate him sharing it with us here at the Mindful Eye, I hope to see you again really soon on the Mindful Eye’s Daily Critique.