Hi everybody, this is Craig Tanner for The Mindful Eye and The Daily Critique.

Today’s image was submitted by Don who is an advance photographer from Georgia. Don was on vacation in Paris France and he took this image on the Champs Elysees the Grand Avenue a Fashion Shopping and he said this was all about telling the story of someone who was asking for money or begging and then people just sort of seemingly walking by in a completely different reality.

Don shot this with the Canon Power shot G10. The interesting technical thing here is that Don used a built in three stop neutral density filtered to slow the shutter down to a 20 of the second to imply the motion and the shoppers. And he says, “This image makes you stop and think about the story in the image. The person begging, the people walking by”, he says, “I consider making this image in the black and white but I like the red cup. Any suggestions about composition?”

This image definitely makes me think about the people in the story. So to me, to answer to Don’s question, yes. To me this is a very powerful image about story and I get it almost right away. Not only do I really like what Don has done here with the slow shutter, the end of the story really suggest that not only are these people not looking or they're not connected they are on the move and so it just sort of adds another level of disconnect.

One of the most powerful things to me about this composition from the design standpoint if we want to talk about that relative to story telling and not so much just is the image unified or those kinds of things is the decision to crop off all of the face or all of the heads of the shoppers. One of the biggest poverties that people that are homeless experience is just to disconnect from everybody else because a lot of times and I know I used to be a lot more like this myself it’s so scary for a lot of time see somebody this homeless. You might give money but you don’t even look or you don’t even connect its like just you do something and you're out of there and there's no connection. In this decision on Don’s part to crop the heads out really for me as far as getting the story it really drives that part of the story home.

Something else that is really fascinating and also disturbing at the same time to me about this image is the scarf and what has happen here in terms of the person that homeless because you see the hand then you expect to see this suggestion of a face you get this very hard, very dark angles and that part of the image is disturbing and from at least for me it is. And from the design standpoint it’s sort of amazing too how it emphasizes this really powerful sense of all of these dark sort of point or triangles of energies and that just starts to play out a whole multitude of ways in the image and that’s really powerful.

I also think this diagonal just this angle on the walkway itself very, very powerful. You know when I think about perfect well improvement for this image I think that it could be tighten up even more. I'm constantly—when I'm looking at images that start to have areas with there's a lot of negative space I'll start to ask myself the question how does this negative space play in the image relative to the other ideas?

A real basic way to think about negative space is just separation for a subject. But we can also start to think about negative space shapes or areas and how they relate to the other parts of a visual design. There are a lot of different levels of thinking about positive and negative space but for me there's a negative space in here that really flattens out and then when I sort of reconnect the story it’s a lot more ambiguous now.

There's a guy back here that just kind of standing there, looks like he doesn’t know which way to go. And then there's some people going on another direction, there are a couple of other people like they're not moving and all these people sort of moving in one direction and then you have this energy, and to me down in here it’s a lot simpler something out happens from design standpoint.

If I crop this down to somewhere like this just real quick doing this, something else happens which is that the negative space up here now you get a feeling of this again that’s a real strong triangle that plays out. You also get simplified on the major diagonals. You get a repetition of that energy here and then you have this energy moving in this direction, you have static versus movement. Something else that happens for me in this crop is that this shape gets more of accentuated. The idea of the hand here and the hand here sort of to get accentuated on a diagonal, the color to me gets a lot more powerful.

I think Don is asking a good question sort of how converting this to black and white. I'm always asking myself that question in pictures of people, in documentary shots and pictures where there's already a potentially very powerful emotional aspect to the story that is being told. But for me when this goes to black and white it really loses a lot of power. To me so much of the power and the color—the red cup and the blue and that starts to accentuate something else for me too. It’s not just potentially homeless are begging and shopping and completely oblivious there's a masculine feel to this, there's a feminine feel to this. When we crop down we just have these two ideas of perhaps of each other in so many ways and one real powerful way they play up of each other is red and blue.

So these are just some thoughts about cropping. I definitely could see making a case for, I'm not going to do to work, but darkening this corner bringing the shadow up again to just keep accentuating the movement of this shape. And it really sort of trying to make this image more about this and here, so darkening here maybe darkening around and here kind of adding a little bit, maybe lightening here a little bit bringing the color up, bringing the red up, those are just some other thoughts.

I don’t want to completely ignore the elephant in the room here. I don’t want to praise either but I just want to say at the end it just a suggestion that I have. Straight photography is something that’s really dear to my heart and if you go out and you do a lot of photography in the street you just going to be confronted with homeless people because that’s where the homeless people live. I found in my own photographic life just staying away from the idea of how can we make homelessness come to an end I think that’s a powerful question.

But on some level we can see across a very long period of time that no matter what the cultural paradigm is in all animal population, there are certain percentage of members of that group that are not going to fit in and for me it becomes more about how am I going to deal with it for moment to moment. And I think a real powerful opportunity for photographers is the form of solidarity with people that are homeless. So you have a mutual exchange and the way that I do it is from people ask me from money if I want to take their picture I say let's do a trade. I pay you because you model for me for a few minutes or for a little while and not only has it given me a way to connect to that part of the thread of my life instead of looking away and I'm not judging anybody for the choice connected to this. There's a very, very complex idea or thing to talk about.

But I know from me that it connects me to something and it has taught me a lot in the last four years and I've also made a lot of friends and I feel like it helped to open me up not just creatively but as a person the whole sort of subculture and the whole idea that for a long time I was afraid to look at, I was the person that might give money but not even say hello or just keep going because its freaked me out so much. Just a thought, just one more thought connected to this.

I want to say a big thank you to Don for sharing the image for all kinds of reasons very, very powerful story telling image. I’d love to hear your feedback about it. Huge thank you to all of you for being here and supporting The Mindful Eye. I hope to see you again really soon.