Hi everybody, this is Craig Tanner for The Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. Today’s image was submitted by Kael, he is a beginning photographer from Georgia. Kael created of this image of the Canon Power Shot and effective focal length of around 35 mm and the camera settings were F56 at a 500th of a second. Kael said she snapped this shot and then when she looked at it, she really liked it quite a bit and she doesn’t know why. And she wants to know what we think of it. So let's get right into it.

There are two things that I like a lot about this image right away. One is the quality of light. I love the fact that there is a really beautiful pattern to the lighting and it's happening in an area of the image that could’ve really flattened it out. So, I juts love what this pattern of light is doing for this part of the image. And not only that it immediately reflects or rhymes to the pattern of the leaves on the ground. The other thing that I love about the lighting is, I'm just rally enjoying the warmth of the light, it maybe the time of the day or maybe the fact that the light is reflecting off of these warm leaves or combination of those two things. And I also like the softness of the light.

You get a real strong sense over in this part of the image of open shadows. And I think that’s helping this image. Back in here, you start to get contrast that begins to be a little bit overwhelming; but over in this part of the image shadows are filling. And the lighting pattern is there and you’re getting the difference between highlighting shadow that’s creating dimension but there’s not so much contrast that the idea of contrast starts to compete with the subjects in the image. The down spouter in the wall, the center block in the leaves and again those open shadows could be time of day. It could be the fill that’s balancing off of these very bright, bit of corner of the house and the Down spouter combination of those things.

There are a lot to like about the lighting here. The other thing that I love about this image is color. And to me color is one of the main things that is taking what could’ve been a very documentary ordinary image and it's starting to push it in a direction or something that is more fine art. This is going to give us a chance to talk about color theory. I haven’t done that in a while this spring. The painters are mixing color well in here and talk about color theory for a second.

We talk a lot about the primary colors and their secondary complements. Yellow being the primary, violet being the secondary complement, blue as a primary, orange as it's secondary complement, red as primary and green as it's secondary complement. What we don’t talk is much about the tertiary colors, its in-between colors. In two tertiary that can really start to push things that are even ordinary in terms of subject and more of a direction of being extraordinary, more exquisite, more painterly, more fine art.

Two colors that can do that are blue-green and red-orange. And to me, if you take this color, the blue-green out of this image it starts to become a lot more ordinary. It starts to become a lot more ordinary, it's one of the main things to me that really take this from just an ordinary snapshot and ordinary scene. It starts to push it in that direction of something that’s much more artful. And you can see the red-orange in here even though this is a matted version of red-orange that’s it right there. And it just plays beautifully off of the blue-green. So I just wanted to mention that and challenge you to think about the tertiary colors and to look for scenes where you may be a little play around with this color pair. I also love to here your opinions and feedback about that part of the image.

Let's keep going, I already mentioned something that I like in this image, which is rhythm. And you see it here but there’s also a great sense of unity based on one of the main ideas, this square opening because of the color here. The idea of sort of square plays out in a lot of ways in the image over and over, and over again and that creates a unity or rhythm that’s pretty powerful. And that brings me to a perfect world improvement.

When I look at this image, one of the other things that I love about it is the idea of something that’s very, very, everyday ordinary because in this case in my opinion light and color becoming something that’s much more extraordinary. And I’d like to keep pushing in that direction and I also like to tighten the image up a little bit. And I think that I can do those two things with one idea, which is to make this more of a square image and get this more in the middle of the composition. The square crop are obviously rhyme with one of the main ideas and by putting this more into the middle, that’s more congruent with the square framing. Centering works really well within a square crop.

And the other thing about square is, because we’re not seeing as much anymore it just has more of an extraordinary feel to it. Square cameras have gone away, everybody, almost everybody has gone to a 35 mm digital and we don’t think of cropping that much. We shoot full frame a lot. So, the square itself has sort of a fine art field t it. So, how could we do that? Well, you know we could just crop but I like most of the information in the image.

There’s one part that I’d crop away and it's this corner over here and I feel like we could sort of loose some information and that would tighten the image up. This brings me into a whole new room in the image and so we just get the crop tool, crop from the left, and just get rid of that; but at this point, I really don’t want to do much more cropping. I really like the information in the image. So now, what I could do is I could work with re-scaling to get this more into the middle of the image. And we could do content and were scaling but it would waste our time because we have to make a selection. And say that we could do something much quicker which is just get the mark key tool and come right over to the edge of the down spout, just right there and do an ALT pull or control J, put that up on it's own layer, at it transforms scale and then scale in quite a bit.

The thing is the viewer just doesn’t have the perspective on this. And so in doing this, the viewer without knowing we’ve done it is just not going to challenge t visually. We could just sort of eyeball this and push it over to the point where we feel like we’re getting close to square. We feel like the downspout is getting more close to the middle of the image, double click, apply that scaling, come back to the crop tool, crop off the duplication over here on the left, double click here and then from here, what I would consider doing is going to my adjustment panel, go into curves making the sampler here active, coming over to here and pulling down on the curve to make that darker. I want to darken the top part and I always just over correct, I don’t think about it the whole heck of a lot, whatever kind of correction I’m making, I always do it to the max, way past the point where I'm going to apply it. I'm going to go back to layers; I'm going to fill this mask with black. I want to make sure the mask is active, black is my background color over here, apple or control delete will fill the mask with black.

Get my brush tool, make sure my hardness on the brush is at zero which is where I want to be to apply local adjustments to the mask. I'm going to go to, let's say a 10% opacity and get a pretty big brush and want to come in and just start hitting n here and bringing this down from the top part of the image. I just want to keep the eye from rushing out the top part there. I just want to darken all of these down and we can stop and see what we’ve done do far. And I'm liking that. And I could keep pushing it.

For the sake of their critique, I'm not going to make this perfect. You get the idea; I'm naïve and come in and in this area right in here, clone in a little bit of information or grab some other information and layer it in there. I would be looking to continue to push this in the direction of making this more and more of a focal point in the image. I might even darken over here a little bit. I’d even open the shadow up and open these areas down in here. I mean the other thing that we could do is, we could come in with a huge saturation adjustment and we could pop that, the blue-green. We could pop that out. When I look at this image, you know, I think from here there’s a fair amount more that I might do to t but its pretty close and it make me think this would be the start of an incredible square crop series of images, of ordinary things and you do work with color and light to make them extraordinary.

I mean, to me this s an image that I just love from a color standpoint and from a rhythm standpoint. I think it would make up a really beautiful exhibition print and let's just look at where we started. That’s where we started and that’s where we ended up just based on the idea of centering and square. And like I said I think we could take this further.

The one thing that I want to mention here at the end is, an Atlanta inspirational weekend June 20th and 21st. we’d love to see you there. This weekend is going to represent an incredible value, other national schools that come to your town like the kind of night schools that are going to charge you on an average around $180. So, it's a great price, large group presentations is one of my specialties. It's something that I’ve been doing for over a decade, speaking for different schools all across the country. I love doing large groups. And we try to get a lot more inspiration, a lot more feeling, a lot more emotion, a lot more of just ideas about how you can be more creative behind the cameras.

So it's not just about the camera and what’s in front of the camera, it's also about however, we’re being behind the camera because everything goes through that filter and we’d love to see you in Atlanta at our first weekend. And if you a camera clubs somewhere in the country and you’d like to bring The Mindful Eye to your city. We have a great sort of sponsorial program where we can work with you in a very affordable way. in a way where your camera club can make some money, bring our weekend to your camera club as a sponsor. So just send an email to us at websupport and id you’d like to sign up for out Atlanta weekend, you can find that by clicking on workshops in the menu bar at the top of our home page. A big thank you to Kael for sharing this beautiful image with us and big thank you to you for being here at The Mindful Eye and The Daily Critique.