Hi everybody, this is Craig Tanner for the Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. We’re going to look at two images today. They are both submitted by Rich who is an advanced photographer.

This the first one that really beautiful landscape shot and architectural shot of up here in Galveston Texas and then the second shot of a real yard moving out towards the downtown skyline of Galveston.

A back story on both of these images is very similar because Rich shot them on the same morning. He says he went to Galveston Texas for a wedding and he have this sort of expectation about historical Galveston in the beach and everything maybe from having been there a long time ago or maybe just from people talking about it but—so when we got there, what he was expecting to find wasn’t there and it was a big light down and then he just sort of remembered to kind of go with the flow and he went out on Sunday morning and found a couple of things that inspired him.

The pear and the real yard shot that we just looked at. The metadata is pretty similar here both for shop with the Canon Digital Rebel same lens 1785 zoom and this would shot on the wide ends 17 after the conversion becomes sort of 28, pretty wide. I would call anything longer than 24. To me, it’s sort of semi-wide but it’s still a pretty wide angle and an interesting thing about this one is Rich stopped almost all the way down on the lens F19, put on a neutral density filter as low as shutter down to two seconds to solve on the water up here. And I’ll just go ahead and say something about that right now. I think it’s a great choice.

Now, the thing about water and landscape shots set are for working sort of traditionally is that if you freeze the water let’s say you shoot it a quarter of a second or faster, there can be so much local contrast in water with bubbles and you really can get a huge difference between the light and dark in that patterning. And all those high contrast ideas can just overwhelm anything else so I think to slow this down some but to still leave some really beautiful softer space shapes in here and really beautiful movement but in some respects break this up and rhymes with the sky. I think it was a great idea technically.

There is something else going on here that happened as a result of whether you probably already figured it out but I’d just let you guess about that for a second while we go over and talk about the metadata on this one.

It’s almost the same with the exception that Rich was shooting this from an overlook on a bridge and he zoomed out more here. This is sort of short telephoto effective focal length that’s somewhere around 65 millimeters. And I might come back and talk about this one a little bit more at the end of the critique. And essentially what we’re going to do now is mainly work on this one. Rich had some questions about these one, some questions about the other one too but this one, I’m actually going to do some Photoshop editing on.

Rich said that it was very hot and humid morning and his gear are totally fogged up. His lens fogged up to the point where there’s fog inside of it so we couldn’t get rid of it and he ended up with this very sort of mystical misty looking image and it is sucked so much contrast out of this that he said he has already made about five different curves adjustment layers to this and his question was he said, “I wonder if the light area over here is too bright and I wonder if it’s just too flat still and I was just to open, should there be more contrast?” Obviously, it’s completely subjective but Rich is asking me. He is probably assuming that I’m going to be the one doing their critiques since I’ve been the one that’s always doing it.

And I love this just the way that it is. I mean one of the really cool things about something “going wrong” like your lens getting fog is it can lead to a really beautiful feeling in the landscape shot. This is happening to me a blue zillion times shooting commercial work and personal work of shot of ton of coastal stuff in the South Eastern United States in the spring in summer and finally learned to start putting my gear in the bathroom with the tub full of very hot water at night or leaving it in the truck, at a car so that this didn’t happen to me but I just did a whole series of pear shots earlier in the year and I got a lot of fog on my lens and it led to some cool effects.

This has a real open feeling to it, almost like how dynamic range or a platinum palladium print and it kind of feels mystical, almost like illustration or something as a result to that so I like this variation. To me, one of the most fascinating things about the image is that Rich framed this in a way where he didn’t get the other support here. You’ve got all the pears and then you don’t have anything here. When I first looked at the image I was like, oh men mistake. That was kind of the first thing I thought but then I was like, “wait a minute, this really cool” because it pulled me over there and it’s bright but when I got out in there, I was like “this is amazing, how this sky has so much beautiful detail” and there’s such a great pattern in there and then I came back and I went over here and then I was like “wow, that creates this ongoing tension” and I keep going over there but I keep coming back.

This is so strong too and it helps to pull me back. I really like the rhythm. And by the way I would love to hear what other people think about this post being missing at something Rich really didn’t even talk about. I think that’s one of the most interesting parts of the composition outside of this really gorgeous guy.

I love the rhythm between these two things. And at the same time, it’s very dynamic. There is an architectural rhythm by the windows but this is all sort of a heavy, heavy gray and this is black and white so it’s really cool, how these two things are playing of each other.