How to Use Wide Angle For Sharper Images

Hi, everybody. This is Craig Tanner for The Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. Today’s image was submitted by Richard who’s an intermediate photographer from Colorado. Richard says that this photograph is a portion of the recently expanded Denver Art Museum which has an edgy futuristic style to the architecture. The building is clad in metal and he said he wanted to try and capture the feel of the texture, shapes and colors of the building so this is more of an abstract shot where we’re going to make an image. It’s more about intrinsic form. He says that he included the blue cylinder down here as a counterpoint to the rest of the composition.

Richard shot this with a Nikon D700, 14 to 24 zoom at 24mm. This is a super right angle shot. He was hand holding here. He used ISO 400, F11 and 200th of a second and one of the really nice things about shooting super wide is that we can go ahead, stop down a lot of times, if we have a fair amount of light and get very sharp picture. Shooting handheld is easier to handhold wider lenses because of sort of the one over the focal length times two as a shutter speed if were hand holding. It can give us pretty sharp pictures. If we do have a job of handholding, it’s a really nice thing about shooting at 24mm here is 68th or 125th of a second. It might give you a really sharp picture. Richard’s even gone a little bit more above that. He’s able to shoot here at F11 which gives him a lot of depth of field and as a nice aperture in terms of a metal aperture, probably in very sharp on this lens overall so pretty interesting this one with basic technical standpoint to know the metadata on this one.

This is a really stunning shot just in terms of right away color. I love what’s happening. The warm and cool color here, this is definitely been photographed in a way where it becomes pretty abstract and things are starting to flatten out in some respects because of the way this has been shot but color brings some really beautiful depth back. I love the feeling of the blue and the gold. They’re really, really pretty how you get a sense of yellow in here in a couple of places in the image is very subtle. You start to move towards a very lighter or washed out violet or dark violet on the cylinder and so you get the yellow and violet color up here and I also love the color gradient. The transition of color from the reflected blue of the sky on this more of sort of silver part of the composition and then seeing the reflection of this part but the yellow and the gold coming back in. I just love the way color moves over here.

Really great use of a lot of diagonal line that’s helping to imply some depth, I love this subtle shadow in here, that’s bringing a little bit depth and I love the sky, boy for this composition. I think that the blue up here would overwhelm the whole thing if you just had a clear blue sky and the fact that there is some texture here and it breaks this up in a subtle way but in a different way; nice counterpoint. This sort of feeling of texture and quality of line, real nice counterpoint to all the feeling of the rectangular panels but it does a lot for this image. It gives a little bit of a visual C-level. It plays the real off of the abstract.

Now if we didn’t know, Richard’s back story here we might not have any idea of the scale of this or the scope of it or what it is and so I like the fact that there are clouds there just like that counter point. It’s a really beautiful image, very beautiful framing, lots of things to love about this image.

One of the main points that I wanted to make today was the idea of images like this that are more abstract and then introducing an idea into more of a slice of something or portion of something, introducing an idea like this where it can start to be more literal and within the context of an image where things are sort of becoming more abstract, you start to get something that you can get your mind around and even if we don’t sort of know what this is because of the fact that it is very high contrast, because it’s a shape right now that implies something that’s different than everything else, all of these angles and the rectangles, this does start to sort of feel like a cylinder, seeing all of it here. It starts to psychologically make me wonder about this. It’s not just the fact that it’s sort of pulls me around and gets me on the other side and it’s very visually heavy. It also starts to make me wonder about where this is coming from.

This for me in a lot of ways becomes one of the most literal things in the image and one of the things that I’ll say when I’m teaching, this comes out quite a bit is to really watch the edges of your frame when you’re doing abstractions and for me almost right away what I want to do to this image is I want to crop it and I want to make this less literal by coming in on it and getting rid of that edge of it and now when I crop it, it’s a counterpoint. We’ll go back and forth here a couple of times. It’s a counterpoint to everything else in the image so I still think that it’s doing its job and helping to anchor us and it’s really giving this image a place in the image where the viewer can rest and it’s a great way to balance all the other stuff in the image which I think is what Richard is going for but now that is a subject that has become more abstract.

And I go the edge now but I don’t think nearly as much about what it is. It’s now another abstract shape or idea within the context of other shapes, right ideas or abstract. Something else to me that’s interesting about cropping it like this now is for me this idea now actually rhymes in a much more powerful way. The idea of all these panels or because I’m not thinking about it as much or doesn’t feel nearly as much like a cylinder. I don’t get as much as the shading moving around the other side and I just can’t go around it and so this is a design point in the image. Actually just plays out one more time but in a very dramatic way because for the first time now it’s straight up and down.

And from here I think there are so many different directions that you could go. This is such a stunning image. You know I think that we could come in and we could do something like this. We could go to our adjustment layer and we could just do a pretty dramatic levels adjustment, you know, something like this, something like this, just sort of leaning on this even that’s kind of interest. The colors have gone a little bit out of control but you could play around in all kinds of ways here to push local and global contrast, you know from here, I would just build a mask with black and adjust to the, an apple delete or ctrl delete on a PC and choose the brush, I’m always making these adjustments.

So zero hardness on the brush and I always use low opacities. You could come in at 10% and get the brush and really just start to paint and play around with seeing if you wanted to create a little bit more movement in some places in this image, make it seeing a little bit more, you could make these adjustments in luminosity mode if you wanted to not affect the color or maybe you’d like to pump up the saturation in some places.

I tend to like color quite a bit and I tend to like local contrast quite a bit and so I’m just playing in here on this mask. This is what the mask looks like. I’ve just made some subtle adjustments. This is the work that we’ve done, just creating a little bit more of a feeling of dimension and moving the eye around a little bit more in the image and that might be a direction that I would go.

Like I said there’s so many things that you could do from here but really, a shorter critique today, one of the main points I wanted to make is in this abstract images, really looking at the edges of your frame and if, new idea start; is there a way that you can come in and crop those ideas so that they become more congruent with the image overall being an abstract and really looking at what you’re doing in these types of images in terms of implying something that starts to either become literal within the context to the frame or it becomes more of a psychological reality for the viewer where they start wondering about something and what it is and how that can start to compete with the rest of an image that’s more about intrinsic form or the idea of intrinsic design.

I’d love to hear your feedback about the Critique Today. I really love what Richard has done today. I really love what’s happening in terms of beautiful color, beautiful reflected light, really great job of abstracting the subject, great framing and we want to say a big thank you to Richard for sharing this image with us on The Mindful Eye’s Daily Critique.