Hi everybody, this is Craig Tanner for the Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. Today’s image was submitted by Peter who’s an intermediate photographer from Sweden. Peter shot this with a Nikon D90, 18 to 70 zoom lens at 25 millimeters after the crop factor, the effective focal length is around 40 millimeters and this is 6 frames that have been stitched together to create the panoramic that you’re seeing here. Peter exposed the panels for the panoramic at ISO 250, F stop was F11 and shutter speed was 1/60th.

Under the back story, Peter says and I’m assuming this is sort of time and chic. This become more or less a tradition to go down to the bridge between Sweden and Denmark after getting a new camera. Last week, I got myself a Nikon D90 and went out to get a high quality panorama of the scene. Peter has quite a few questions under questions and comments, so which is great and I want to kind of take those one at a time in a minute. I want to talk first about what I like about this image.

It’s a really high impact image for me. It’s very graphic. I love the panoramic format here for this subject. I love the way Peter’s working with contrast and the quality of line on the bridge to tell the story of following the bridge out and then getting to what, to me is one of the main subjects in the image. The suspension part of the bridge where the super structure changes that there’s a obvious unity here with the reflection that rhymes this sort of arching feeling of the long line of the bridge and that helps to tie the ends of this together. But one of the most important parts of this image to me is the sky. It just couldn’t be anymore perfect in terms of framing the bridge and also creating a balance of energy, there’s such a strong powerful feeling of the movement like this in the image and then having the slight diagonals sort of moving angulating line of this particular sky. Pushing back really helps to balance things out. It’s obviously very repetitive in terms of the original quality of line that we’re going to see here, so, just really beautiful how the sky is working in the context of this image.

And I really like what’s happening in this area out in here that could’ve really flattened out. You’re getting a really beautiful reflection of this movement of line in the sky. You’re also just getting a really strong sense of kind of a circular implied quality of line or movement in here that’s beautiful, and I love the way this is sort of the dark at the bottom that helps to contain the eye same thing over here.

I love the fact that this have presented in black and white, I think it really helps to add to the graphic quality of the image and to just simplify it. Something else I’ve mentioned several times in the Daily Critique is worth mentioning again today. The placement of one of the main subjects, the suspension part of the bridge is unified or congruent with the framing device and at rule of thirds is not just some arbitrary concept. It’s relative to the framing device. Part of this when we talk about rule of the third so much in 35 millimeter photography, is that full frame 35 millimeter photography. If you look at the ratio between the long side of the frame and the short side of the frame because it is a rectangle, if you take one out of the other of these lines and divide them into each other, you come up with a ratio that if you’re talking about the long side and the short side, this is very close to 2/3 and so if we take the main subject and place it 2/3 of the way to the frame or in the other way of saying let’s put the main subject on a third, then the placement of the main subject is congruent with the ratio of the frame and other sides of the framing device.

Another way to think about this, is if we were to– let me start over here again really quick. This is worth mentioning this today, if we we’re to take the 35 millimeter rectangle, something like this, if you take both of these lines and you add them together by simply taking this line and just stretching it out, so that it now is like this and then you mark the place.

Now that you have one long line that’s been made by taking this line and folding it out and then you mark the place where the two lines come together to make the long line. That now will give the ratio that I’m talking about in a panoramic shot obviously one side is much longer than the other side, and that means if we do the same work, than instead of ending up to something that looks like this, we end up with something that looks like this and Peter’s placement of this subject is congruent with the framing device. He placed it on the third it’d be somewhere like this, but in the panoramic, pushing it further out to the edge, is more congruent with this ratio with the sides of the framing device.

Then when it comes to square, this why square is so darn easy. You can just center your subject and then it’ll look great because all the sides are the same sides now are eco distant from each other. It doesn’t mean that rule of thirds goes completely out of the window because rule of thirds also talks about just tension and the general of the sense.

So the difference between formal symmetry and something that is not formally symmetrical where both sides are exactly the same in formal symmetry and then we cut something in a way where we don’t have formal symmetry. With this idea of rule of thirds is not just some arbitrary concept. It relates first to the framing device. I just want to mention that again today.

Let’s look at Peter’s questions, I’m going to start with the last because the first question sort of makes a lot of the other questions moot when you look at what I ended up doing to this. Peter says the sky is very bright, just above the bridge, just with us with the way it actually it was, but it doesn’t look like bad editing. Maybe I should come in and make it a little darker in here. Peter’s talking about this kind of perfect framing with the sky. You know, you might, I can see where somebody now, the way we’re looking at pictures is different. We’re probably thinking more about the editing process, even people are not very sophisticated about photography. They’ve heard the word Photoshop and you do get a little bit of the feeling that particularly once Peter asked the question and I thought about it. I might come in and darken this area in here, just a little bit, create movement that’s not quite so perfect in terms of the framing on the bridge.

Then Peter says there are few wind power mills under the bridge to the left, shall I leave them and or take them out in the small version. I think I see them way out here, but they’re really, really small and I can’t answer that unless I would see like this printed very big. It may be something that really sort of creates a counterpoint to this idea or adds more depth to the image once you see it.

Sort of my rule of thumb is asking a few people and saying if they even know what it is. If it’s so small that people don’t know what it is then it can start to just look like a mistaken in the printing process. We really have to see the print outsize and if this size is not factoring in because I just, I sort of get a suggestion of that out there where it’s very, very hard for me to see and play the impossible in the video.

Peter says, what about the crop? I already said that, I really liked the crop a lot. I love the panoramic crop relative to the subject. Peter also says that what about this bright area right in here? And this is an area the image I’m questioned almost immediately. It flattens out quite a bit and some thing else is true, I’ve mentioned this before on the Daily Critique. Shooting bridges with the wide lens and now they’re going panoramic, you get this perspective distortion where the spaces in between the supports seem to get wider and wider apart and it can be pretty complicated to try and figure out if you’re going to start in the middle of the super structure like this, where to start, to keep this first span from being awkward.

And one thing that you could do here to help to break this up if you wanted to make this thing more symmetrical and more unified and not have as much tension as you could. Grab information from right here and then scale it in and put it here and that’s what I’ve done on this layer. Just being interesting to see how people feel about that. I think at the end of the day, after spending some time with the image I like that feeling better than having that flattened out space on the left hand side, that really starts to may be trap me over there or hold my eye. But I will have to say that once I do this, I do start to sort of start to feel the risk of it’s too unified.

Ultimately, Peter says, would it make sense to soften in order to make it look like I used a much slower shutter speed and that question prompted me to play around with motion blur on the water and when I did I thought, oh man, I want to go in a completely different direction with this image. And so, this was my take on the image. I ended up doing a huge motion blur on the whole image to create something that’s much more ethereal and part the reason why I like this as a variation is to me now the destination, this part comes forward a lot more. I start to think much more about moving on here and much less about the sky. I’m starting to think a lot more about time and the image actually starts to have a lot bigger psychological impact on me.

So it’d just be interesting to hear from Peter and also hear what other people think. Clearly, this is very, very modified and you could get a similar effect particularly on Nikon that did this brilliant thing. Some of the cameras now where you can do multiple exposures in the camera, so you could get this effect in the camera by doing multiple exposures, panning on one, shooting straight on another and doing the blend or doing it like we’ve done here. And once you get to hear then, you could tone because this is surreal now and abstract, and may be toning add some other kind of emotional quality to the image. I kind of like both of those tone variations, but I do end up liking this quite a bit and part of the reason why I could get that there and like that quite a bit as we started out with something that’s just absolutely stunning.

Peter gave himself an assignment to me, went out and totally nail it has this really beautiful image that’s kind of make a great exhibition print. I want to say a huge thank you to Peter for sharing this image with us on the Mindful Eye’s Daily Critique.