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

Today’s image was submitted by John who’s a beginning photographer from Denmark. We have the backstory on this when John shot this in his backyard garden. And John also says that the purpose for shooting this image was of making a background for his computer so this is basically a screen shot for his computer. And so we’re going to talk about the image in the context of that type of views or self assignment for the image and then we’re also going to look at this image that as if it was just a stand alone idea, it gives us sort of two ways to think about this image and it will let us talk some about sort of purpose for our work and what a big part that place and number one, how we make our photographs and also how other people see them.

We just have a little bit of metadata here. John shot this with a compact point shoot, a Dantax, and John had a comment here, he said, he worked with a picture on Adobe Photoshop Elements and he concentrated on blurring the background and also cleaning up color back here. And you know, one of the things that I like about this shot right away is how simple it is. You’ve got just a real simple photo focus sharp here on the main subject and soft back here and very, very simple from a color standpoint, all these negative space in the background is pretty much green and black. And then you have the yellow that’s much brighter than the green but it’s an analogous color so it harmonizes with it which is nice. Yellow and green are sort of close to each other on the color wheel and then you have the yellow moving in the red and red and green compliment each other. And then you get a little bit of violet here that can compliment the yellow, so it’s really beautiful color relationships that are happening in this image. And I think John made a great choice to choose this as a subject matter.

I love the soft quality of light here in a macro or semi-macro shots where you’re really trying to show detail and here is not just a flower, it’s also the detail of the water droplets. A real soft, sort of luminescent wraparound light source can work real well. We don’t have real harsh highlights and shadows to compete with the subtlety and softness of this as a subject. And the other thing that I’m just really enjoying here is the way the combination of the light and the water droplets and way the light is falling on this and all of the different ways that we’re getting highlight and shadow and then highlight and shadow, there’s a real powerful feeling of just depth in this image and form in the main subject and I’m really enjoying that.

You know, if we’re talking about this image in the context, a basically a screen shot then I love all these negative space back here. If you just look at this image and you didn’t know John’s purpose for shooting it, one of the things that you might say right away is, boy we could’ve maybe have come in a little bit closer on the main subject but you know as a shot for the screen, if John does a very job of keeping his screen uncluttered than I do then if he’s like normal people then he might have his hard drive up here and a few things over here, maybe a couple of things here, and so on and so forth. This kind of keeps the screen organized in effect because it will be hard to read icons that are there and really beautiful negative space, all the way around this. So, I think for this intended purpose, this framing is absolutely awesome.

But let’s just pretend now so that we can have a little bit more fun with our critique today, let’s just pretend that this had to be a stand alone image, just kind of give me a chance to revisit something that people had questions about from last weeks critique where I talked about square crop and how cropping might change the way that I think about the arrangement of the elements, a visual design within the frame.

In a perfect world, even if this was going to be used on the screen or we’re going to take advantage of this negative space with some icons on the computer desktop, I would still like to make the auto focus areas specular here look a little bit more believable. It looks like John’s done quite a bit of blurring and I’ve been guilty this myself, when we start blurring in Photoshop, if all we do is blur, particularly if we’re using Gaussian blur, the auto focus areas can really start to flatten out in a way that’s just very different than natural flow of focus relative to depth of field.

So, one of the things that I would encourage you to do, if you’re going to need to do a significant amount of blurring is to add a little bit more local contrast into these areas and/or some noise and just go to filter, select noise and add a little bit of noise in there and it can help to make the auto focus areas little bit more believable. And I’m going to show you a layer in just a minute where we’ve done that.

If this was standalone image, I personally would want to crop it a square. I don’t want to get rid of a lot of a negative space without those desktops icons. I really start to feel like this, area of black can start to sort of overwhelm me and pull me out of the image. And I just feel like there is too much of all these around the main subject and so I would look at this at a square crop, there was something like this. And what I’ve done here in terms of placing the crop is I am working off of one of the major diagonals.

One of my favorite things to do is just pay attention to the diagonals so even when I go to a square crop, the idea of a major diagonal’s very, very powerful in terms of just a simple thing that you can do in terms of an element or visual design, it can make your images more dynamic and help them to present sort of a cohesive front to the viewer. These corners are just so powerful and there’s already because of the corner such a strong implication of energy that moves from corner to corner. And when we can either crosshatch diagonals or here cropping away where the implied energy points right into a corner and then that ends up playing all the way across one of the major diagonals. I think that can work really well.

For me when this gets cropped, the black negative space to the right of the flower, it starts to sort of be a nice counterpoint to the flower instead of having that line of black that leads you out maybe to the edge of the frame and then out of the image. When it gets cropped, the circle negative space of the black for me ends up harmonizing or rhyming a lot of the feelings that I’m getting from shapes that are happening on the flower itself and so a much more likely is the viewer anyway for me personally go over here and then ping pong back in a rhythmic way to some of these other space shapes.

One of the things that I would look at doing it if I cropped it like this is to add more black in here and to add more saturation. This is pretty strong and I feel like if I add more black in here that I’ll make the flower even a little bit more visually exciting and that will help to balance with this sort of circle of dark negative space now so I’m going to turn on a layer where I’ve done that. I’ve also added the saturation to see what you think. And the next thing that I’m going to do here is add some noise to the background. And I’ve done over the top here maybe very hard to see in the video because of our compression scheme, that may be too subtle to show up but that’s just one of the takeaways I’d like for you think about in today’s critique is when you start to blur in the computer, we need to sort of get some local detail back into those areas so put that to look believable.

And you know, the other thing that I might look at doing here is just darkening a little bit all the way around. I really sort of like both of these variations in terms of the way this is being presented. I really like this shot a lot from John. And boy, as a screen shot for the desktop on the computer, it just seems to be almost perfect, beautiful quality of light, really beautiful color study, and really beautiful moment with the water droplets on the flower.

And we want to thank John for sharing this image with us on The Mindful Eyes Daily Critique.