Hi everybody this is Craig Tanner for The Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. Today’s image was submitted by Bertold who is an intermediate photographer from Poland. Bertold says he wanted to take a portrait which didn’t necessarily rely on eye contact that work. He also wanted to convey a sense of calm and serenity in the portrait subject.

We don’t know that can embody that Bertold shot this with the Canon 24-105 zoom lens at 105 and a shot wide open here at F/4 and our shutter speed was a 2/50th of a second. Got some interesting information about the lighting and lighting is one thing that I think is really beautiful here in a lot of ways. Bertold has a flash that is modified by an umbrella.

Now, the portrait subject’s left to camera right and it’s sort of a high to low light source and then Bertold has a fill card down here that’s bouncing the light back and helping to soften the shadows that are being generated by the key light. And the questions and comments; Bertold say, does this image works a portrait and do I feel the common mood that he’s trying to convey? And I love this image, this is part of the reason why I picked it out.

So many things to like about this, I love the idea of getting away from the eye contact, I love the dramatic gesture of the head turned down and the eye close, not only that but this idea of half of the face been covered by the hair, but the closed eye half the face been covered, these are things that create mystery and it’s very evocative for the viewers, that’s very powerful and I definitely think that peace or serenity could be one emotional feeling that the viewer could project onto this portrait subject.

I love what’s happening with the light in particularly right here, to me the main subject, the thing that’s really sort of selling the mood that Bertold is going for or selling, whatever mood the viewers are getting from this is the closed eye and the quality of light here is just really sort of stunning.

I love the combination of these highlights, they’re moving across the eyelid and over the eyebrow and then the shadow and all of these creates a very, very dramatic triangle and just creates a lot of dimension, really makes this a very powerful archetypal idea in this image.

Lots and lots of things to like here, the shallow depth of field, creating some dimension as evocative and beautiful, the close shot, the tight shot, the idea of coming in and I’m conventionally cropping not showing the top of the head and even the bottom of the face, so I think it’s very powerful again helping to accentuate the mood in the eye, lots of things to like.

When I think about perfect world variation here or perfect world improvement, I would like to push even harder the idea of evoking a mood and I would like to bring the idea of the eye forward to even more as much as I love the light here and in some other places in the image, there are couple of places where the light to me is taking away from the main subject right here as a sort of a hot spot, I think this shape up here, for we’re not going to crop the images is pretty important to help to balance the lower mask of the face and the nose. So I think these two ideas are needed but I just would like to tone down what’s happening with lighting up here, same thing on the nose here, as much as I love the light here on the nose, you’re getting instead of a dimensional quality of light; real flat light on one side of the nose and pretty bright and because of the hair which I like but because it’s creating a shadow. You also have real high contrast too, it really starts to make the portrait subject’s nose come forward and with her looking down. And Bertold being this close, that’s also accentuating this part of her face and we can turn that down by sort of turning the light down after the shot in Photoshop.

The other thing that I think about here is the lips and how they may be competing with the idea of the eye. There’s a real strong sense of movement down to the mouth and lips are real powerful archetype obviously for all kinds of reasons and then the color red is the most visually powerful color so that can start to compete in all that. It starts to make me think of a black and white conversion because it’s much easier to manage sort of value and contrast changes in monochrome than it is in color or colors are mutually depending on each other, things can start to look funky if they really start to lean on colors. And obviously, if I go to monochrome, we’ll take the red away and you can also imagine that in monochrome, when you look at this image, this is going to easily become the highest contrast thing in the image. And so, I just went in and looked at the channels and even with a black and white adjustment layer and all the stuff that’s been added into the raw converter, I know I said this the other day and I don’t want to offend anybody, but you know it’s just, I love some of the new things in CS4 and I’ll probably keep updating my versions of Photoshop as long as I stand to photography as much as I am now, you know in my career.

But so much stuff is being hit on this that is not practical in a lot of ways, you know and so much of the times, this is how I still convert to black and white, I come and I just pick a starting point on one of the channels based on what I’m trying to do and so much of the time, I see the red or green channel and I go from there and you might think, ‘Well Craig, why do you do that?’

I do it because the reality is once I get to here, I’m going to come in and make local adjustments anyway and I would rather do that with curves and levels based on trying to change one area or painting on a blank layer than going in to an adjustment layer that has a bunch of sliders when I pull on and it just affects everything everywhere. I would just rather get a decent starting point and go from there so I’m sure there will be some people that will e-mail me and tell me why the black and white adjustments layers, the greatest thing that ever happened to reality is I just don’s use it that much.

The first thing I did after picking the red channel was I went to just a layer and I blurred it just slightly because of this idea of calm and peace, just trying to soften this up a little bit more and obviously I did not blur the area around the eye but everything else got a little bit of blur.

I then came in and did something that’s kind of funky; this area right here is an area that’s at the top, it’s centered over all of these energy that’s so powerful in the image and I don’t really want to see this sort of part in hair so I just did something kind of rough but I think he’d get away with just like this. I came in and I just selected something like this and put it up on some of the layer and I just scaled it over and painted part of that in there and that’s what it looks like so there is before and there is after. And I like that, it’s a subtle thing but I think it cuts down on that high contrast part of the image, it’s right in the middle pointing down.

I then came in and started to work on these areas that I said that I wanted to tone down, I used a couple of curves layers to cut down on the feeling of light in those areas. There’s one and there’s another one, you could see I’ve really sort of flatten this out with the exception of the eye and then from here, I think there’s a million different directions you could go in, I mean what’s interesting is we make this layer active and we go to the adjustment panel area and click on curves, you know, I mean, if we just start to play around with just anywhere on the curve just to adjust them you know, we could go for some really cool high key thing and what’s so interesting, part of the reason why I flatten things out the way that I did is you know, just flattening it out and then leaving the eyes, the thing were just a black point and you can see that from there, you can get all kinds of feelings by just making simple curves adjustments and I happen to really like you know, something that could be really funky, do is something that’s very, very high key, really making the eye come forward.

And let’s go back to layers and we’ll just chunk this and we’ll just look, you know, some other things that are played around. What I came in on this version and darkened all the way around the outside, pop the light on the eye a little bit more, this is just a blank layer, there’s not anything on there.

And then what about this? I mean this is not the peace and calm and serenity thing anymore, it’s something else but there are just so many directions that you could go in once you sort of just created the left dramatic light is just happening on the eye.

So I’m going to leave it for there. I’m going to leave it at that point of for today. You know to me, couple of big takeaways from looking at Bertold’s gorgeous shot here, just the idea of dramatic gesture or encouraging people to be emotional or to do something in front of the camera that’s evocative. And again, the idea of showing less but less is more and how powerfully evocative I can be but what of the main things is just the quality of light here just starting to play with lighting and seeing light and using light to create dimension and to accentuate your ideas really, really beautiful light moving across the main subject, beautiful portrait subject, great image by Bertold.

I want to say a big thank you to Bertold for sharing this image with us on the Mindful Eyes Daily Critique.