Hi everybody this is Craig Tanner for the Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. Today’s image was submitted with Duane who is a professional photographer from Atlanta, Georgia. It’s going to be a two part daily critique. Today, we’re going to talk more about the idea of composition and design. And specifically, we’re going to talk about the flow of energy in an image. Tomorrow, we’re going to talk more about just the technical approach of shooting a shot like this where you’re shooting a skyline or panoramic skyline, any you kind of the cityscape at night, we’re going to get in some techniques connected to that.

Really interesting back story on this image, speaking of technique, pretty complicated technically at the level of camera. Also really interesting, Duane says that it took him several months to just find this vantage point shot and get the permission to actually shoot from here and boy could I relate to that. Shot property is a specialty in my commercial photography career and so I know exactly what Duane is talking about in that part of the back story. And Duane says this photo was specifically shot to convey the lights and action of the city and to ensure convey the size and prominence of Atlantic station which is this development, pretty new in Atlanta relatively to the older part of the city. And Duane goes onto give us his technical data here. So pretty complicated, Duane shot this with the Nikon D300, 17-55 zoom at 22mm at F11. And for my understanding at this process, Duane has three panels here. And within each panel from the tripod, he bracketed a series of exposures going from light the dark and use Photomatix to create an HDR version of those images. And what is HDR? It’s High Dynamic Range, Photomatix types, the different exposures and blends them in a way so that the viewer sees a greater range than the camera could see in one shot from the brightest thing in the scene to the darkest thing in the scene. And each of those 3HDR shots had been stocked together, stitched by a panoramic factory version 4. Duane says he’ll thought about adding the moon or some stars but I don’t know if it would help, it just confuse the situation. Your overall impression would be greatly appreciated. Let’s get ride into it.

One of my first impressions is the value of the persistence, tenacity and hard work. I also know that for those things, to show up that more than likely some kind of very powerful purpose is going to be have to be behind them, so much of the time that purpose is love. Either we just love what we’re doing so much that we really go these extra ordinary lengths to do the things that we do. And for those people, it typically doesn’t feel like that. It just feels like a wonderful accelerating part of the process or we might do something sort of Herculean at the level of action based on love for another person. So much of the time, the love is going to need to be there for the hard work and the persistence and the tenacity to be there.

So I just want to mention those things, the real basic level of process. And I also wanted to mention how much I love does view of the skyline at downtown Atlanta because it’s not. Well, I haven’t seen the city from this vantage point. Also I haven’t seen Atlantic station and there’s a new stuff in the context of the rest of the city. I’m loving that as an native Atlanta. And I also love the design on this image. I love the panoramic format obviously joined needs that to put this on a context without ended up with a whole bunch of sky and a whole bunch of stuff down here at bottom. The panoramic work for well in an obvious way, but I also love within the panoramic frame, this lyrical flow of movement across the top of the image that it’s rhyme by real lyrical flow of movement down here. You also get a real strong sense of something very dynamic here, not just across hatching of diagonals. If you looked at the contouring lines and then connect that with implied flow of energy, you end up with a cross hatching of S curves. So you have contouring lines that making S curve, and if you just go moving in the same flow to the next highest energy then the next highest energy, next highest energy and then the corner. Over here, there’s an implied flow of energy with these lights into the billboard and to honor offering up. Then the next most energetic thing for me would be this and this and then out of the corner of the frame.

So that feeling of design is beautifully. You’ve got a sense of that too in sort of these ellipses that pushing to each other, and that’s really beautiful. Really cool design. Mike who is a committee member also, a big supporter of TME, thank you, thank you Mike for all your help over the years. So could just give you some point elaborate about seeing the flow of energy in an image is that lines associated with your subject whereas actual energy for example from a wave or clouds so on and so forth. The lines associated with subjects are contouring lines. And obviously, they’re going to play into the idea of implied energy which is much subjective. But these contouring lines are something that objectively, we can talk about. And we can say that these lines make a space shape called building. And, we can also have a contouring line that’s such a slim line that it really just a line. You could take a picture for instance, horizontal picture. Let’s say this is mud and so went took a stick, and they scratched a line into it, that would be a contouring line that follows the path of that scratched. But a contouring line is a physical line, you can see they’re just a line itself or it’s a line that defines a shape and those are objective.

Implied flow of energy or implied line of movement, let’s say from one subject to the next much more subjective because we can’t say that everybody will go from here and then keep going there from here to here to here to here. We can say that it’s implied but we can’t say that people will follow it. It’s also multi-dimensional. And so I want to talk about that. I want to give a plug to the website that probably all of you already know about luminous landscape and specifically, I love my Michael Wrightman and I love what he’s done there. It helps me out a ton over the years. I also want to plug another favorite photographer and teacher John Pocock Junior. He has a great tutorial on composition of luminous landscape and I’m going to link to that because he has really brilliant way of taking an image like this and using let’s say a filter on Photoshop to reduce it into a sort of the skeletal structure of the image. So it might be easier to look up this subject that they were talking about now which is the movement of energy or just a basic flow of energy within an image. It’s really multi-dimensional when we talk about implied energy. Let’s just give it for instance.

Let’s pick this subject which is one of the most powerful subjects in image. Why is it so powerful? First of all, where is in the frame? We have an implied flow of energy just based on the blank frame. Left hand side has more weight than the right top because the gravity has more weight than the bottom. We also have this bit of math that a very powerful we know about this idea of rule of thirds which implies the 35mm framing but this is panoramic frame. So if you apply rule of thirds theory to the panoramic framing, we would get a ratio by having the short side and dividing the long side of the frame into it coming up with the ratio.

And then using that to determine the placement of the subject within the frame that would happen on a line that that ratio tells us, this is where you should cut the line. So this panoramic instead of rule of thirds, it’s more like rule of quarters of rule of fifths. And this building is on one of those power points relative to this framing device. Rule of thirds would be here because this is so much longer than the short side. The main subject gets pushed out further. So you have that bit of implied energy. Then you also have the architect the building itself, high contrast. You have all these movement up here.

So these are kinds of things that implication of flow of energy could drive in the image. It’s going to drive how we want to cut the top of this image. How much negative space do we need above this so the implication of the movement of the center has some space to live and breathe in? It would be just like a breaking wave and we need to consider not only the way itself but the viewer doesn’t just say, “Well, this is still photograph. Some of us denied everything I know it would be true about reality. They may kind of assumption about that energy continuing to move and this where we start—at the most basic level, we need to start to think about the flow of energy as people move to the image. If we cut this image right here, I mean obviously that’s going to destruct most people.

So now, let’s look at it in even more complicated way. The energy of this building also moves in this direction and then implied energy starts to hock up with other subjects because even though these two subjects are not physically connected, the energy flows into the other subject. How well this work together? I think brilliantly. If you look at the overall implication of energy, you get this really sort of beautiful anchoring pyramid shape. You have nice negative space here, here and here. This doesn’t work at all for me relative to what I’m talking about. It blocks the implied flow of energy of the contouring lines of the roadbed. It blocks the physical contouring line itself. It ends up being a merger. It also gets on tangent with this move of energy and start having nice negative space for this at the base of it. It lines up with it and could start to block the flow of energy in this direction in the image. And then you have something else that makes it even more complicated, psychology. Maybe somebody is afraid of skyscrapers, maybe they hate traffic, maybe they love to drive, maybe they have a job here and they’ve live in this space and I love it. Maybe they invested money here and lost or made money. Who knows, all of those things starting to have huge effects? We have to start to think about archetypes and those kinds of things.

And the most basic sense, if I wanted to manage this image or flow of energy, here’s the things I would do. I’ll get rid of the building and I’ll try to accentuate more of this design across hatching S curves. I would do a series of steps in the right hand corner to try to accentuate this flow over here of the S curve. And so that’s what I’m going to do. You’re just going to see me go through, just keep watching series of steps that exaggerate that line. And this is where we started and this is where we ended. Also, change that color but I want to talk about color tomorrow because that’s enough for the day. We love to hear your feedback about the Critique so far. A big thank you to Mike for his question. I love to get more questions from you about the Daily Critique that really helps me to make content. Huge thank you to Duane, this is an awesome image given us a chance to talk about lot of things. We’ll revisit it again tomorrow. Hope to see you again tomorrow in the Mindful Eyes Daily critique.