Hi everybody, this Craig Tanner for The Mindful Eye and The Daily Critique, today’s image was submitted by Sherwin who is an intermediate photographer.

Sherwin says the photograph was inspired by seeing a fantastic sky and then searching for foreground to complete this shot and this photo was made with a Nikon D70 converted to be sensitive to the infrareds back form of light. We’ll talk just a little bit more of that in a minute. The lens here was a 12-24 zoom at 12 mm, so after the conversion here. The effective focal length is 18 mm. A very wide and at ISO 200 in F8 this is powerful is exposed for 1250th of a second. Just too quick mention about the infrared version of the D70, we’ll put up a link to Max and Max there. One of the best companies that does this conversions, if you send them a camera I think it's around $450 to do a conversion and I'm getting ready to do this myself. So hopefully I’ll be talking more about shooting with an infrared converted camera and then dealing with the images on Photoshop and so on, and so forth.

This image has a couple of sort of classic hallmark, so shooting a landscape within IR converted camera with IR filter on a regular camera, the real dark blue here. The blue part of the sky and the clouds popping-off of that in a real dramatic way, you can get this effect with heavy polarization or with other types of filtration. This sort of a classic look in infrareds is a great choice here. With the real dramatic sky that goes infrared and another classic look, that you can get from infrared is glowing foliage. So seeing this tree glowing, you particularly get a sense of that out in this part of the image.

I just want to mention a couple of things about infrared and I can totally see a shore and be motivated by the sky here to take a shot just an amazing sky in this image. I want to talk about that for just a minute. There’s a real strong sense of simplicity, even formal symmetry in the background. Take it with the way that this has been framed to get a real strong sense of this shape in the middle of the image that can be split almost right down the middle of that part of the sky and turned t into two ideas. They are very similar and then the framing on either side. The overall shape is very similar; but there’s also some feelings of dynamic things within the context of the sky.

This negative space over here on the left hand side and it's interesting to see these two shapes. On the ends of the frame they’re the same but within the shape you have a real dramatic difference. You have white surrounded by black here and black is surrounded by white are here but pretty strong sense of formal symmetry but very simple, very graphic, and very dramatic, and real powerful sense of movement in the sky.

And I think that Sherwin has picked a great foreground here to play off of this real string feeling of a sweeping quality of line about positive and negative space shapes up here in the sky. Particularly out in here, the split row fence and the way it arch’s to the image plays beautifully off of the sky and then including this tree is another main subject if not the main subject to the image. Really powerful anchor in the image and really beautiful the way the tree really rhymes off the background in a couple of ways. It's essentially the same shape as this middle section of sky and the texture is very, very similar.

When you look at the texture up here and the hearts on the tops of the leaves at the ends of the groups of branches, you get a real a strong sense of that same texture; repeating over and over again n the sky.

A lot of things to love about this image, you know and another thing to mention here is IR or infrared works really well in super hard light. You could tell from the shadows here, the light just banging in to the scene. Another great reason too, potentially if you have the money to have an IR converted camera. Home is part of your bag of creative technical things, equipment things that you can work with. I think about perfect well improvement for this image. There are a couple of things that I think about, one of main points here I wanted to make today is so much of the time when I'm working traditionally. I'm drawn to something this beautiful. I like this guy and they’re trying shooting it in a way this beautiful and I'm maybe thinking about visual elements of design. A lot more than I typically do if I'm on a shoot from the track pot and do a contemporary shoot of a landscape or architecture.

So much of the time, I’ll do exactly what Sherwin did. I’ll react to something that really draws my eye that I feel this beautiful. In this case, the clouds and then a basic sort of discussion I have to myself is how I want to shoot this. Do I want to work with formal symmetry, or dynamic symmetry? And a lot of times if the main subject is formally symmetrical. I might start to consider arranging the other subjects; foreground and metal ground in a formally symmetrical way.

In this one variation, I might think about here, I love to see what this looks like. If you just dead-centered the tree so that it came up and this cloud bank and did this. At these two ideas that rhyme the tree, a background that rhymes it and then sort of trying to work out a section of fence that kind of wraps more around the foreground. I don’t even know if that’s possible from looking at this. I mean depending on which way the clouds are moving, and if they’re moving, straight overhead then I can imagine having to move over to the right to get the tree to show up and the space over here. That might not work with the fence, the shadow, or other ideas just a thought, s there a way to shoot this that’s more formally symmetrical.

And the other thing that I think about in this image and t also has to do with possibly moving over there is number one. As beautiful as the high contrast is up here down in here with these rocks really start to pop-out and create a sort of a chaotic pattern of high contrast. That starts to really pull my eye away from the graphic the simplicity of the thing that Sherwin was drawn to in the first place which is the top part of the image. The second thing that is happening, the way this has been framed is that this area really flattens out and because it flattens out and there is so much visual contrasting movement everywhere else. This starts to have become the main subject one. There’s really not anything there that is sort of interesting or supporting or balancing something else in the image.

If I just have to work with this the way that it is, one of the things that I might think about doing is trying to darken this a little bit but coming in and doing quite a bit of digital guarding and getting rid of all of these high contrast areas if I darken that. Next is recedes so it pushes it back on it. It’s not as important visual anymore. If I get rid of contrast, a little local contrast in there that does the same thing. It makes to recede and I could even see coming in and spending a lot of time and digitally guarding out all the high contrast in here. If I'm going to go for a dynamic symmetry then to me it would really help if these areas down in here in the image. The area right here behind the fence and this area in here separated in the same way that the background is separating in a very dramatic way.

And I could do that by potentially digitally guarding and so heres just a start on that work. Heres as variation where I came in and I darken that middle ground area, I got rid of a lot of the contrast, and then you could start to sort of ask yourself visually the question. What if we get rid of the contrast as we see it through the fence and the fence just became a singular idea and t popped out. Then we continued to sort of push this dynamic symmetry in a way that is more graphic and what would happen. Having said all that, it's a really beautiful landscape image and it's a great example of why having the infrared choice can be real powerful, creative tool for you if you shoot landscapes.

And we want to say a big thank you to Sherwin for sharing this beautiful landscape image with us on The Mindful Eye’s Daily Critique.