Hi everybody, this is Craig Tanner for The Mindful Eye and The Daily Critique. Today’s image was submitted by Steve. He’s an intermediate photographer from New York. Steve says this photograph was taken on Cape Cod Bay. He says he loves trying to capture storms especially those nomads on the background, its dark, and the foreground is bright. Reversing the visual cues that we typically think of, that suggests depth and distance in a photograph. And he says, in this case he was drawn to the scale of the people on the sand bar against the approaching storm clouds.

This image is taken using a night D50-50 mm sigma lens. He said that after live one of the shooter speed of 180th of a second and I totally agree with Steve here. I love the sense of scale in this image. I love the quality of light. I love the way the bright light in the foreground is creating contrast not only on the people but on the sand bar you have the highest area of contrast and the biggest color contrast right here and all that really let's me know where to look even though the people are very, very small. This whole corner of the image has the greatest color contrasting and just value contrast.

And there’s something else that I really like about this image is. I just love the moment relative to the way the clouds are lined up and the way they sort of create visual movement and energy that relates to where the people are in the frame. You get a sense in the negative spaces and in the positive space shapes, shapes that push down towards the people. And then I just love this sort of little connecting idea right here that sort of in between the people and the higher clouds. Not a little slight diagonal but just kind of switches the energy from here over to here in a really beautiful way. It kind of takes all of these energy up here and sort of concentrating on the little cloud bank here, kinds of repeats it again and then you get down to the shape of the people and you really just sort of have this beautiful feeling of movement of ideas that just expand on a diagonal throughout the image.

I really love that and the sky itself forgetting about just the movement of the things that I just talked about in the implied direction of movement is just a gorgeous sky n terms of the shapes of the clouds and the simplicity of it. The top part of this storm, it looks very etherial and it just has a quality to it. That’s an amazing counterpoint to the start contrast in sort of reality of the people standing there.

One of the things that this image definitely could make you think about because it is so simple and so graphic because black and white is something that I do to every image that I look at. We don’t always talk about it one The Daily critique but I did want to talk about that today because I don’t like this in black and white. And I wanted to talk about why I really don’t like it as much it's still a neat image. We got our channels and just look at some simple monochrome versions. Let's go to the red channel, you know initially it's sort of like a wow. And we go to the green channel not as dramatic, but you could imagine making changes to this and making it dramatic; but what’s really interesting to me is that in this image the color of really sells foe me the emotional impact of the people sort of against the storm.

The color on the color version is very simple and the background is very cool and very blue. And that recedes and makes the feeling of the storm even sort of more etherial. And then, the one area where warm really comes in. Here on the sand part we have this sort of yellowish tan. It really accentuates the idea of the people standing in the light and the difference between the experience that they’re having here in the light and you know what could feel like a sunny day at the beach. And then this sort of ominous thing that’s coming behind them. This is a good example where the emotions that we tend to associate with colors are really helping to sell the concept when we get rid of this sort of emotional baggage that comes with the colors.

In this one, we actually are loosing something because to me the colors are congruent with what Steve is trying to say; and also just very, very beautiful color to me. The way the color gradient happens with the blue and then sort of the tail on the blue-green and then back to the blue. I particularly love the way color plays-off of what this person is wearing right here just this figure which really brings me too.

One of the main things I would think about for improvement here, I’d love to just see that one person standing there if you’re open to changing the editorial content of the image. I think I would clone everybody else out and there are a lot of reasons why I would do that. One, just goes back to this idea of the person against the storm is a lot more of a dramatic story than a whole group of people against the storm; because there’s safety in numbers, just from a visual design standpoint. There’s a grouping of people right here, they’re all in tangent with each other and that starts to make just the visual design of that part of the image very busy and very heavy.

And there’s not much this interesting happening with color and any of these people over here. This person’s shirt is a perfect harmony. It's almost like taking these colors and combining all of them and that’s very powerful. And it's just also a lot easier for the viewer as a story teller to tell a story about the one person standing there. And so, I would come in and clone those people out. I did that in a rough way and I know I was going to loose the sand bar doing it the way that I did it. So, I came back in and clone the sand bar back in, so far that’s where we started and that’s where we’ve ended up. And then, I came in and I added even more saturation to the bottom. The right hand corner, I'm going to turn that layer on now and its subtle but I'm trying to give the right the right hand corner even more weight and have even more fun with the green and blues, and the tan, yellow in there but increasing the saturation.

And then, this is very subtle but I turned down the saturation and the top clouds to even ghost that out even more. And push even more the contrast between sort of the etherial and nebulous and the real sort of hard-bright color realty of the person standing on the sun almost seeming oblivious to this thing that’s happening in the background.

I just wanted to show this real quick. This is just a blank layer. Let me make it active. A lot of you already know this but in CS4 one of the things that made this work easy in terms of cloning is, what if I’ve hit the S key and make the clone stamp active when I'm cloning, I typically use a hardness of about 30% on the brush. And a lot of times I'm cloning that 100% opacity and that’s where I'm at right now to use the clone stamp, I hold down the option key and option click and sample some pixels.

And I want to get rid of this little smudge there to make this line even more graphic and easy to do in CS4 because if I come in and just sample there, when I pull the clone stamp over that area it shows me the pixels that I’ve sampled. So it's very easy to get everything lined up just the way that I wanted. Then I can click and then that problem is gone in a very meaningful way. And by the same token I can come in and do the same thing right over here, just line that up the way that want it, click and get rid of that little smudge.

And then on that layer just sort of cleaning up those kinds of blemishes in the line, I didn’t do it perfectly; we’ve already working 100%. I could come in and clean all that up, just getting rid of those two little blemishes, you know it's amazing how little areas of contrast with things that break a pattern can really pull the eye and if we’re talking about traditional design, it can really take away the look and feel of that. Here’s where we’ve started, here’s where we’ve ended up. And this is the kind of shot; we’re going to see this. The sand bar is there, everyday it makes me think of a whole show of images of different people standing there ding different things. You know just different archetypal things. They could be doing the different qualities of light; it would be an amazing show to me. An image like this makes always you think could this be the start of a series. Really beautiful, beautiful landscape shot.

We want to say a big thank you to Steve for sharing this with us on The Mindful Eye’s Daily Critique.