Hi everybody, this is Craig Tanner for the Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. Bill who is an intermediate photographer from Australia submitted today’s image. Bill said he went to the beach with his grandson and he created this image. He was going for sort a man against the storm or man against nature kind of feeling. He shot this with a Pentax K10D and 16 to 45 millimeters, which makes the effective focal length semi-wide somewhere around 30. Bill step down to F11 and expose the file for 1125 of a second. Another comments Bill said he would like to make to make his grandson a more dominant part of the equation and it is one the of the things he thought about after looking at this shadows he would have gotten lower.

Let us get into it here, I love the concept and I think Bill has a feeling of really well here. He’s got a very dramatic storm like kind of sky to this sort of a character in the story in the background, very beautiful, I love the framing, I love the way the beams of light are fanning out and great moment here with the grandson. There is an energy here that definitely suggests movement best in the way the handle of the wagon is in this particular moment and the fact that there is a diagonal movement here, I think that works well and I think the classical placement of subjects in this image relative to the framing device is working really well.

The rectangular framing device here and Bill’s placing the main subject have brake points in the image that are mimicking the ratio of these two lines, the relationship to each other. I got about two-thirds beach and water and the third sky with the grandson on about a third of the way through the image. I think that works rally well and sort of think about perfect world improvement for this image we’ll talk in just a minute about something we might do. Adjust the level of the camera Bill mentioned getting lower in that would make the grandson more dominant.

I could also say getting closer so just coming in even closer and that would do the same thing. And something that tries and does so just to take away from today’s critique just a good sort of practice is if I’m shooting a portrait, if I have time and it’s practical to try to do at least two basic variations. One if I’m going to landscape with another landscape where you do shoot environment dominant like we’re doing here but then try a real classic cinematic kind of approach where you get in much closer. You could bring in the camera, the lens to get almost right behind the wagon here. Almost right on the back of the wagon focusing on the grandson shooting more wide open and then just suggesting the storm having the distance sort of out of focus, kind of an over the shoulder cinematic approach.

The other thin that I think about here to make the grandson more dominant id getting more separation between the wagon and the grandson. I’m assuming that he is right handed because he is pulling with the right hand and so I might have thought I’ve getting him to pull the wagon in from this side, so you’d have the wagon and the handle and then more of a separation with the human figure here in that case. But with then being right handed and coming in from the left, you got a tangency here. And the other thing that I could say is that he in fact was coming in from the side maybe moving the camera over to the right and trying to play this title pull as a balancing element more around this side of the image.

So more of this, and then an idea here and that starts to set up your feeling of kind of triangle of subjects that are all potentially balancing each other just a couple of other things just a couple of other things I think about at the level of the camera. If you start to think about it in Photoshop trying to accentuate some obvious things that we can do, one of the things that we can do is some digital gardening. Down the foreground of the image getting rid on some of the some of those extemporaneous high contrast will help to bring the main ideas forward so there’s a layer where I did that obviously brightening would help. There’s only so far that we can go with that in a matter of taste but also a matter of just making it believable with this kind of backlight. But just continue in this sort of push to this idea here of really sort of created a venerating and actually made the background even more exciting and more contrast to the grandson and have continue to push that idea with those two layers.

So there’s just sort of a basic trying to create a little bit of a spot light effect on the grandson and create more of a feeling of this back and forth man storm an storm. The next thing that I want to talk about here is why their critique up is color theory. Something out that is sort of playing against Bills’ grandson being a dominant in idea’s color. The lime green here is such a radical color in the context to the shot. There is really not anything to balance at either from a harmony standpoint or compliment standpoint and then when you have this real bright yellow to it what starts to happen is that, instead of sort of an archetypal idea human being kind of working in the environment with a props.

You now have parts of this concept becoming their own subject. The cause now becomes a subject. That is actually separate from the archetype of just human form and parts of the wagon start to become subjects relative to idea of overall wagon. And we could play around with color, in here I just did select color range and selected the yellow and selected and the green and just played with the hug e slider trying to create more of a harmony compliment of color that can make this idea more o f a simple archetypal stand-alone idea in the image.

Here is two layers where I just took the yellow and the green and push them towards the sort of fairly wrinkle blue to harmonized those colors with the scene and with the color around the wagon and around Bill’ grandson being fairly monochrome. You now basically have a harmony of color ideas. So these two things are the main characters and they’re harmonizing and then you could also p lay around I think with pushing the outfit towards a very needed orange and now you’re literally playing color opposites with the main two characters but you do now have a harmony of color in one aspect to the background. So you got a little bit of yellow kind of orange trying to come in there just a little bit. And now you have a color here that can harmonize the background so there’s some unity there but then a color opposite. The neat thing about this is that the orange and red and blue down here can kind of play with each other in a way where you don’t get too overwhelmed with any one aspect of the parts. Of what we’re kind of wanting to be one idea that will be interesting to hear from other people what they think about that. You know the last thing I did here at the end was I just played around with getting some of the color out of the area around the grandson. Again, another way that difference has been saturated in this saturated and trying to bring the idea of the grandson forward and there was that layer, here is where we started out, and here is where we’ve ended up.

Great moment here, really dramatic sky, what a great character in this story, great moment with Bill’s grandson, with the energy of moving out the sort of a pose to the storm. And we want to say a big thank you to Bill for sharing this image with us on the Mindful Eye’s Daily Critique.