Hi, everybody! This is Craig Tanner for The Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. Today’s image was submitted by Ryner who’s an intermediate photographer. Ryner say’s every fall this field is plain with wild flowers and this is a spectacular morning with dew and with fog. And I shoot when I was winding down someone qued the horses and when I got off a couple of shots before they move to another part of the pasture.

This was shot with a tamer on 24 to 135 SEM lens at 69 millimeters and at ISO 100. When Ryner start down that to F29 and exposed the file for 8/10 of a second. Let’s get right into it here. The moment is great and I really loved what has happened here. Just in terms of creating these foregrounds based that allows the horses to have a space to separate them in the pasture. And just the framing where those breathing room around the top of the flowers and breathing room down here around sort of the bottom line of the flowers and very classical placement of some of the main ideas. The highest energy part of the flowers is they move up on this line is breaking the frame in a dynamic way and the horses are too. They’re almost 50/50 on up and down in the image but left to right. The horses here are in a real dynamic place.

The black and the white horse here real powerful point in the image once you see it and it’s playing off in a real dynamic way. This idea period it’s really nice to how there’s a diagonal movement from the highest energy point on the flowers here back over to the horses and even these line the trees back. I’m really enjoying how that’s playing all of the movement of the flowers overall and also just the shape of the flowers. Quality of light here is beautiful. If you get a sense of the fogs sort of clearing but the real soft light goes along rather well with the shot like this where Ryner is just shooting the pasture and you’re not including the sky and the shot.

Lot of things working really well here and I start the thing about perfect world improvement for this image. One of the biggest things that I think about is color and as much—I love the framing and as much as I love the idea of the wild flowers—the fall wild flowers and the full foliage and how all these things are configured. In terms of their placement in the scene from a color theory standpoint, one of the things is taking away from my enjoyment of the image is a clash that’s happening with the pinks and the oranges. And just bringing the color well here for a minute is pretty interesting if you do a Google search of color theory.

You’ll get all of this information on colors that work well together. You get a lot of information about complementary color. You know colors that are opposites on the color wheel like blue and orange that can drive a lot of dynamic that into anything that you’re designing but what you don’t see so much about is a color clashing. In part of that is because unlike same these two colors are opposites and being able to in a very scientific mathematical way talk about how they play off of each other color clashing to some extent. There’s a lot more subjective but a lot people agree that two colors that are very-very difficult to play off of each other or any kind of version of pink and orange and so it’s just something to remember.

It’s not saying that it can’t work. It’s not saying that color clash may not be the idea that you’re going for but it’s a combination of two colors and I don’t think I’ve ever specifically mention this in a whole time that I’ve been doing at the Daily Critique. It’s a combination of two colors that a lot of times Craig collide a bit of visual designate—and what essentially that we’re saying here is that when you’re looking at this image. It’s very-very difficult to be in this space back here without getting pullback to the pink and vice versa. It’s very difficult to enjoy the pink with so much orange in the shot.

This image is laid out so beautifully in such a great moment. Any time I have any kind of color issue that I don’t think I’ll be able to correct. In the difficulty in correcting is that if all the flowers were sort of one color and particularly if ever all this dark pink. It might pretty easy to go in there and turn this to primary red. Now, red and orange play very well together and red in green very together, so if all these flowers were a primary then from a color that’s their standpoint. It might worked but then you’d have the other issue of what’s happening in terms of the white that you’re trying to talked about of the two main subjects which to me is the flowers and the horses. Now, they play with each other so anytime I’m really struggling to manage color. I tried to change to heal these flowers, and it wasn’t working for me.

I think about black and white and I’ll just go ahead and have a look and in this case I look at the red channel in black and white and I like that quite a bit right away just doing that and not doing anything else. Something else that I need like sort of become aware of when I look at this image was that it would be very subjective moving forward from this point for Ryner. Let’s say whoever was shooting or working on this images to the side how you wanted to play the white between the flowers and the horses. You could get the flowers more white and with the horses is sort of a discovery, you could turn the flowers away down and bring the contrast and the horses up and bring them forth, or you could sort of play an even or any sort of minor variation thereof.

And for me with this image being so soft to start of with, I started to do something and I do so much in the elevating process. Even if I’m looking an image small, I’ll do it and doing right now you brought here me else just put back in my chair. My chair is on roller’s here on a big pad and I’ll scoop back in my chair and I look at the image from a distance since start trying to just taking the image and more of an abstract way. And all times that will help me decide or sort of imagine looking at the images a print and when I do that. What I think about in this images potentially a very big print where from a long way you would get this sort of pattern feeling and then as you got closer. You discover the horses and they would draw you in. Just because once you saw them it’s such a powerful architect type ideas, so I thought of lowering the contrast overall and pushing this sort of towards this a ferial sort of training kind of feeling and so on this layer. I reduced the contrast on the flowers.

I just did by picking a point on the curve near the flowers picking two points. It’s kind of putting the flowers in the middle and flattening that area of the curve out. Then I came in and I had film green to again sort of tie everything together. Green will do that and it’s sort of an overlay.

To start of try and tie everything together and again just continuing the push for sort of this dreamy feeling overall and then I came in. I did some cloning; I did the cloning to get rid of some ideas like this, and this sort of white spot behind the horse and some body’s flowers and point’s sort of really high contrast. I thought of trying to make this shape more of a definite shape and also just playing of the shape of the line—the quality of line that was seen in the line of the horses and such as cleaning that up a little bit and here’re what that work looks like. I’ll turn that on and off again trying to just simplify the overall shape of the flowers. Not only the playoff of the shape of horse, line of the horses but also line of the heads of the hardwoods in the background.

This is so sorry we’re probably can’t see that and you really can’t. It’s just a tiny adjustment the contrast and horses. This is not so settle I came in and again, to reduce contrast. I got rid off this feeling of the pasture in here getting dark in some places and that’s starting to take away from the horses, so just kind of continue to push for lower and lower contrast and so here is where we started and here’s where we ended up.

We’d love to hear your feedback about this critique and it’s a really beautiful image. Great job by Ryner from the technical standpoint, it was very little time. Looking at the shutters a bit here I have to assume that Ryner shot this from the tripod. It’s a really good job of doing a beautiful of framing the scene in a very short amount of time. This is something that’s unexpected and those kind of shots can be really though, really gorgeous landscape image, bringing a lot of beautiful things together. I want to say a big thank you to Ryner for sharing this image with us on The Mindful Eyes, Daily Critique.