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

Today’s image was submitted by Sam who’s an advance photographer from Pennsylvania. Sam shot this image on an infrared converted Nikon D200. He used a Sigma 10-20 zoom at 10 millimeters after the conversion factor. Sam is shooting this at 15mm effectively, super wide shot at ISO 100 and at F14. Sam exposed the file for a 30th of a second and shot from a tripod. Sam says that this is a resort and then on playhouse, it’s very near his house so that he was attracted by the quality of light and the glowing trees. And he knew that shooting this that the trees would take on this really beautiful glow that you’re seeing in the picture. And he said one of the things that he loved is he like the way each section between the column are framed to different trees so a sort of like four pictures within a picture and said, he also love the architecture of the porch and the chairs that are around the porch.

Under questions and comments, Sam says that he’s not sure about this chair and could there maybe a better way to manage that. And he also says that he’s not sure about the crab and not sure about including this much of the ceiling. And he says that he kept the house on the left of the house wall on the left for sort of a secondary discovery.

Let’s get right into it today along with Sam, I do think that the strongest part of the image is the time of day that Sam has chosen. And just the beautiful effect and the beautiful view, the effect from the IR and the view that we’re getting of this IR look on these trees. is just stunning. It’s a stunning panorama here. And this was a commercial shot, it would really help to sell the space. And the quality of light is perfect for this shot. It’s really beautiful to begin with. This archive a design of the porch and it repeats on the porch railing and the ceiling and the bottom here and then the quality of light with the shadow from the porch railing is rhyming that beautiful feature of this porch.

Again and I do like seeing some of the beaded ceiling up there, it’s very beautiful. And it gives a feeling about this porch in addition to the other things we’ve already mentioned that’s something that’s a older world and gives us a psychological impact in terms of thinking about time and history and that’s beautiful. I do love the designs of some of these chairs, the high arch by crackers and how that rhymes the arc of the porch and the waker here at the arch of that is beautiful. And I agree with Sam about including this wall on the house itself from the structure with the doorway. I think it’s a great visual design stop that pushes back but then it really served running contrary to that psychologically it makes me wonder what’s in here but because visually, it pushes back, it doesn’t pull me out of the shot. It just gives me even more sort of psychological depth to the story. Lots of things to like about this beautiful infrared shot.

One of the reasons I picked this image today is that almost every time I’ve done a weekend event where I’ve been talking to a lot of photographers, at least one if not more photographers want to come up in a break and talk about architectural photography because I show some of our architectural work and we do weekends. And people are typically very curious about two things. One, just commercially getting into it because they know that it’s one of the major areas that are available to photographers that want to shoot commercially and make money with their camera and people are also typically very interested in lighting architectural spaces because that’s a mystery to a lot of people. There’s not a lot of good information out there but the people are also curious when I mentioned that a lot of times rooms are rearrange to the camera. They’re interested in that part so I wanted to take this chance because this is a commercial space that Sam is shooting to talk about some of those things today.

I also wanted to go ahead meeting this right in the middle of the critique. A big thank you to all of the people who came to Atlanta Weekend, we made new friends, we saw old friends, we had a great time. And I wanted to mention this, we have tentative cities picked for our 2010 Mindful Eyes Inspirational Weekend. There’s Seattle, Las Vegas, Austin, Cleveland, Washington DC area and Miami. If you live in any of those cities and you would like to help us out a little bit with our weekend in terms of helping us find a space, there are some other things you might able to help us with. We have incentives like being able to come to the event free. We also have other incentives. And we’d love to get an e-mail from you. So again, that’s Seattle, Las Vegas, Austin, Cleveland, Washington DC and Miami. We’re planning on visiting those cities in the very early part of 2010 of January and February. We would love to hear from you. Again, thank you to all of the people who spent the weekend with us in Atlanta this last weekend.

On a practical level, when I look at this shot, one of the things that I talked about when I talk about shooting architecture that a lot of people don’t realize is that an interior space or sort a quasi-interior space like this, a porch that has a lot of stuff, there’s a lot of furniture, has a lot of other accessories and things. The typical scenarios that everything that you see on a shot of this commercial shot has been re-arranged to the camera so typically, what happens is there’s a series of scouting shots in a vantage point is chosen. So, a general camera position, a lot of times that’s based on what we’re trying to sell. You know what are we going to shoot towards that that’s the most important thing to sell.

And here, I mean this view with the infrared camera would really sell the space so that to me this is an awesome vantage point. But once we’ve figured the vantage point let me go ahead and say this right now, Architectural Photography, very, very challenging to me. People by far is the most difficult thing to shoot because the psychological potential difficulty, the fears and everything that photographers have around interacting with people. I mean, you know, if you’re going to go out and shoot Cinema Verity style or stay away from people then that’s completely different. And I make a lot of people mad if I say it like that so I won’t say that but I don’t have a lot of space for that type of shooting.

In my own life personally, I think it’s taking things from people without asking and I think it’s pretty lousy generally. That’s a whole another story. If you’re going to actually deal with people then it brings up all kinds of social fears and psychological fears. And then you just have the technical idea that your subject is moving at all these different things so people is the hardest thing that I’ve shot. And then next would be any kind of architectural shot that starts to veer towards an interior where you have a lot of subject management.

Part of the reason why it’s so difficult is that if somebody asks me to shoot this porch, I’m very limited about where I can put my camera. It’s not like a landscape where I can keep walking. It’s not like if I’m shooting out here. I can keep going from tree to tree and have a lot of different possibilities here. If I’m shooting on the porch, my vantage point starts to become very limited. So, one of the first things I wanted to say today is that shooting a shot like this, it would be nothing for me sometimes to spend as much as 30, 45 minutes, or even an hour just trying to figure out the best vantage point.

And it’s really interesting when you start to shoot in this way. And one of the things that you’ll learn is that you may really surprise yourself if you stick with one subject for a very long time where you’re require to sort of find the best vantage point and maybe shocked. You might walk around a few times if you’re new to this and think well that’s it, those were my only choices but then you can keep looking, looking, looking and something clicks, this maybe slightly different than you’ve thought within the context of the space.

The next thing would be once you figure out the vantage point, the reality of most of these shoots is that this is a commercial shoot, this would be very typical. I was working with an assistant and a client everything would go. And I mean everything, all of it, the rugs, the whole thing, you clear the porch off, and you would start over. In that way, as you added one thing, the idea would be the sort of approximate the furniture that’s typically here but as you added each thing, it would be so much easier to have it relate to the space and the quality of light and this vantage point and then have each thing separate from the other thing and you’re building visual unity as you go. If you just have this stuff out here and it’s like musical chairs and you start pulling one thing out, pushing another thing over there, it’s not a good way to do it. And so, yes I’d like to take this chair away but the reality is I would like to take all of it away and start over.

If just looking at this, I’d like to take this chair away. I’d like to take that chair away and take one of this away and move this back so that this shape brings the eye around. I just have one chair over here so I don’t have big tangency here. And this is just gone so it’s creating a tangency and we’ll see more porch and more open space. This is gone, the table has some cool stuff on it and that’s in front of this. This chair is over here, this chair is over here and there’s something that’s very cool that it gives a warm and fuzzy psychologically, that’s hanging over the rail that creates a shadow here that arcs around, that becomes the foreground. Let’s just might take right off at the top of my head so I would radically re-arrange all the stuff.

The other thing that Sam’s already mentioned is all of this real estate up here and I’d get rid of it. If we crop it down having all of this down here, the shot will look even more out of balance. So, it’s really hard to see a meaningful crop here. I mean, I’ll do it but you’re going to get a sense that if I crop down to here, we actually wanted more up there because this is so visually heavy but if we open this up then I would never want that much ceiling. In fact, I might even look at re-scaling this so that I even had less ceiling than this or I might really darken this down and bring up the reflections of the columns. Essentially what I’m trying to do is keep the eye looking at the view or whatever the main thing is. It is so tempting to go up and get the top of the room when you’re shooting architecture but so much at a time is because of depth, it just ends up creating a lot of problems for you. And the other thing, the reason that you sort of stay away from it a lot is that a lot of the times, you’re bouncing your lights up there, you’re actually using the ceiling as a light source.

So, those are just some things that hopefully if you’re thinking about shooting architecture, just some ideas that might help. This place is close to Sam’s house. I’d love to see him go back and maybe get permission from the folks there to take a few chairs off, simplify it, take another look of it. Having said all that, it’s a stunning shot, stunning, it’s beautiful. I’ve just sneak picked a really, really beautiful shot, just sort of give us some ideas and some thoughts about shooting architecture.

I really appreciate you being here on the Mindful Eye. I really appreciate Sam contributing by sharing this beautiful shot. I hope to see you again real soon on the Daily Critique.