Hi, everybody! This is Craig tanner for the Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique.

Today’s image is submitted by Bevan who is an intermediate photographer from Australia. Bevan shot this with a Canon 20D 24-105 zoom at 24 mm at ISO 100, stopped down to F18 and exposed the file for one second. And Bevan in the back story says he wanted to depict the water rushing out after the waves and wrapping around the wreck. And he said, he was happy with the water trails left in the image. He says, he wants to know how the impact of the mood could be increased in the image so let's get right into it here.

One of the things I really like about the image is the idea here of leaving a line. I think that that works really well. I get a real strong sense of these lines, if I start in the lower part of the image and moving me out to this line, this is the highest contrast in the image so I’m going to end up here pretty quickly if not starting there but there is a really beautiful quality of line in this lower part of the image that helps to break up. What could have been a pretty flat space shape down here.

The other thing that I’m enjoying in the image is the exposure of one second, that’s doing two things at one time. It's helping to simplify the surface of the water and these kinds of shutter speeds on the surf action when you’re shooting bigger landscapes can work really well anywhere from a third of a second to a second or so. If we go much longer than that, things start to flatten out a whole lot and that can be really effective too depending on the mood you’re going for but you can start to loose this kind of detail or you do get a really nice combination of movement and in leading line and shapes, they’re pleasing without freezing all of the water bubbles and having this real high contrast surface on the water that overwhelm so really nice use of a shutter speed here. And I’m enjoying the warm and cool color combo here, the blue here and then the feeling of warmth out here. I’m liking the way Bevan got low enough to let the wreck break to horizon. I think that’s real powerful here. It really helps to move us up into separate part of the image.

When I start a thing about perfect world improvement, if we want to enhance the mood, I can see making this quite a bit more dramatic and there are quite of few things that I could see doing to this image. You can see from the video that I’ve got a lot of photo shop layers here. And I’m just going to go through and talk about some of the things that I did. One of the first things that I did here was and let me encircle this so you can see it. I created a separation on that part of the wreck and the cloud. And I just did by doing some cloning on the layer and I want to turn this on and off again so you can look at what that tangency does for the image. It really becomes a sticking point and it's hard to move back and forth in here. Just a real small detail but to my eye, it makes a big difference.

From there, I did some re-scaling. I actually made a selection over in this part of the image and I took this part of the wreck and I scaled it out even longer to create more of a feeling of dramatic line in the image. So obviously, some of the things that I’m going to do here are going to be changing the editorial content of the image.

So, you can see, what do you think of that change there and how it changes the way—you might move in the image. From there, I came in and I did some re-scaling and I took these clouds and I scale them up and I’m doing that to try and create some diagonal movement that continues this diagonal instead of having a feeling that all of the clouds here are sort of on the same part and it starts to create a feeling of less depth in this movement even though it's subtle to me, it really helps me move it in a little bit more of a dynamic way and more congruent with the wreck of the ship on left hand side of the image.

Next thing that I did, if you look right in here in the image, I came and then I took this a little bit and kind of cloned it and try to do it in a different way so that you wouldn’t have repetition. But I tried to create a continuation of the separation of sort of the ribs of the ship here to break up this area that is starting to flatten out and get really dark and heavy. And the repetition is such a powerful concept in all of the arts. So, it not only breaks up that areas, it’s very flat and very dark and very heavy, it also creates a beautiful repetition with the rest of the design in the wreck and also with these ideas that are breaking up the lower part of the image and just some of the simple line of movement in the surf action in the background came in from here and did something on that layer that I don’t even remember what I did anymore so let's just keep going probably correcting some kind of a mistake with a mask.

And I came in and I re-scale those clouds on the left up even higher. You can see that if you look in the left hand corner. Again, I’m just trying to create more diagonal movement and make a little bit more dynamic and a little bit more unified in terms of the way those clouds play around with the idea of the shipwreck. And now, you know when we start getting into changing value and changing color and those kinds of things, one of the biggest things that I wanted to do with this image right away. Hey, let's do this real quick, I was just going to save these editorial changes all at once. You see, you can see what you think about those. Darkening the top of the image to really contain the eye, I may just zoom out up here at the top. This is a real small file or raw file. You could take these brightest pixels and make them black and not having the issues but the size of this file. When I went in to do this work, it really started to fall apart pretty quickly. So, I couldn’t take it nearly as far as I would like to have gone darkening the top. I’d like to have gone even further.

You could see the bonding and stuff in there but even darkening down that much really starts to help to contain the eye and keep me in the image a little bit better then I came in and I pumped the local contrast and all that movement in the foreground to sort of match now the color intensity and the greater intensity of the sky. I came in and played around a little bit more of the local contrast using the levels and a mask and then I came in and pop local contrast even more and then I came in with the curves adjustment and I open that shadow up in there where things were pretty dark and heavy.

And so now, let's look at all the changes from here and see what you think but I still really love to add quite a bit to the top in terms of density, another stop and a half or so but the file just won’t take it.

I just want to show you one other thing is a separate file. And in this file, what I did was I took this part of the image and selected it and then re-scaled it out to create more of a feeling of movement into the wreck of the ship on the left hand side of the image. So, I essentially re-scaled that. I made the canvass bigger to accommodate it and that’s what that looks like. And I like that quite a bit better and the reality of my landscape work in architecture work and even lot of my people stuff, I use re-scaling like this all of the time. So, we sort of dramatically reposition the wreck in the image relative to all the ideas and the left hand side of the image is so important. In the west, that’s where we want to enter and I really think adding that extra space over there makes the idea of the shipwreck a lot more interesting. We can sort of get our mind all the way around it.

I would love to hear what you think. This is a beautiful image to start off with Bevan’s picked great subject. A really beautiful framing, great use of shutter speed, really nice leading line. A great example, I’m just making up a foreground out of nothing by using one second of time and the movement of the water, beautiful image from Bevan.

Great to be back on the Daily Critique, thanks a lot everybody. I hope to see you again real soon.