Hi everybody, this is Craig Tanner for the Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. Today’s image was submitted by Edmund who is an advanced photographer from Massachusetts.

Edmund recently created this image on the Mindful Eye’s Death Valley National Park Workshop. I want to talk about what I like about this image and then I want to do a couple of things. I want to talk about a basic technical capture technique for a minute. And then, I want to get into on using layers to create more local and global contrast here to push the illusion of form in this image. And also, need to say something else to be fair to Edmund.

First, a big thank you, Edmund has generously offered for us to work with any of the images he created on the workshop, in the context of a Mindful Eye educational video and this is unfinished image. Edmund basically took this image in raw mode, did a quick conversion to monochrome in a light room and that was as far he got with it.

And so, this basically sort of a just starting point of an image and that’s nice because we can work to these layers and talk about what we might do. And at the very end of the video I want to make a point about raw capture and also a point about our finishing is a part of your process as a photographer.

One of the main things I love about this image is just how beautiful Edmund has work with the lighting, the lens and the camera placement to create a series of leading lines and also a space shapes and how they relate to each other. To really let me know as the viewer where to go in the image and be able to move around in the image.

You’ve got some contouring lines that are very dramatic that move us to the image. Those are lines that outline shapes in the image and then you have some implied areas of movement like this negative space shape becomes around is very important. Anchoring around rock in the bottom ranking right in corner.

Another one of those lines over here right uses negative space. Really beautiful the way the eyes led to this image. Something else I like the image in terms of quality of line and movement, there’s a real nice example here of dynamic symmetry.

You have all this movement, with all these shapes and lines pushing from right to left. You really just have one strong feeling of movement from left to right and that’s right here but this one line can balance all the other stuff, why? Because it’s were the highest contrast areas in the image. Also, because it’s different than most of the lines that here.

Most of these arc in flow and this is a very hard line and when things are different then everything else in the image, they take on a lot of visual weight. And also, because the implied movement here is very strong from left to right. It’s easier for the viewer to move in this direction because that’s how we read in the west and also moving from high to low is easier.

All those things add up to make this a very powerful pushback to all this energy and can be pretty beautiful effect particularly when we have a rectangle or framed image. To play one thing off of another like this, where one area is pretty small and the other is pretty big but they can balance each other because the relative visual weight of both visual concepts.

There some other things I really love about this image one of which is just a lot of really beautiful repeating textures and patterns that you see over and over again in the image. Something else I really like about this image is you’ve got this landscape that could sort of be mars or earth 4 billion years ago and then you have this sort of eye happening right here. And this feeling right in here of a real powerful archetype almost as if this thing is some kind of a being or shape or whatever.

I start to think of an elephant because of the texture and the color and I want to play around with bringing that out. I’m always looking for archetypes that might have a psychological effect on the viewer. These are things that the viewer doesn’t have to consciously recognize but they can have a big psychological effect, they can keep the viewer with the image longer.

They can also give the viewer an emotional feeling about the image and I’m going to link to this. There’s a great article in Discover magazine this month that really points to the fact that it’s emotion that really help sort of seal the deal. And anything, any communication that has an effect on us and we remember it and we really gets inside of our consciousness. It’s really the emotional depth of those things and that’s why I love so much to look for archetypes and to play around with the idea of archetypes.

So let’s talk about this technical thing real quick for a second. It’s all about leveling your camera. You could use a spirit level in the flash, on top of your camera to level to the physical arising. But in the scene like this, we’re not seeing the actual horizon, this to the viewer is what is going to appear to be the horizon but in fact; this whole block of land is on an alluvial fan. It's moving on diagonal down hill to the valley forward down here.

So if we level to the spirit level here, we still end up creating a feeling for the viewer that the camera is level and it tends to dump the viewer out down here no matter how hard this bush is back. This is the kind of scene where I would level it based on feeling my way inside of the camera, instead of looking at the spirit level.

Whenever I don’t have a true physical horizon, where a land meets the sky or where in the far distance or where water is meeting the sky. Let’s say in an ocean scene, I’ll tend to balance base on feeling. You might say, “Craig, who cares,” because we can fix this in Photoshop.

But fixing in Photoshop sometimes it's complicated, it may cause you to lose information in the image. In this case. I wanted to bring this up but leave this part of the image relatively on effect, which means I’m going to have to do some more work. Besides just using edit transform skew or something like that.

So here’s the layer where I did a combination of a scale move and some touch at work. And there still some issues in here. If I was working at this, let's say a 100% that I would need to repair and work with cloning, but see how you feel about looking at this. For me, scaling the left hand side out really helps me to keep me in the image a lot longer.

The next thing I did was I took this shape that I've already identified as being potentially very visually powerful and I moved it in this direction. Why did I do that? Because from a psychological standpoint, a lot of times is the transitional movement from one subject to the other that’s more psychologically powerful for the viewer in actual contouring lines. And this is a tendency here. The energy of this is almost directly over the center of the rock and it starts to create for me a sticking point in the image.

By just moving this over here in this direction, I can create more of a dynamic feeling with triangular movement between these three subjects. So there is that work and I'm going to bring that out with my layers. And here go sort of the, you know, the layers where I’m creating more of an illusion of form.

At first it occurs adjustment, I took all the areas that were dark and made them even darker. I then came in and tone the sky down quite a bit. And I’m going to come in lighter and create local contrast in this sky to create more form and movement within this sky itself. But this is a move to just take the whole area of very bright sky here and here and just tone that down for now. Did that work?

Then I came down with the levels adjustment and place the difference between very dark and very light even more. I came in with the blank layer and soft light mode pending with the low black with the low opacity and try to create more of a container for the eye. You’re going to see a lot of areas around the edges of the frame getting much darker to try and hold the eye in the interior parts of the image. Create more of a feeling or form like that.

Then I came in, this one is subtle. I tried to pop this low dark midst and create more of a feeling of texture and grit by taking that part of a curve. And there, I’m making it steeper and applied that locally. It’s pretty subtle, there’s before and there’s after. And then I came in with another levels of adjustment and I tried to create much more of a stronger feeling of form in here in this archetypal shape that I like and some of the areas that are dark, continuing to push the feeling of depth in the image and here’s where I came in and popped that section of sky. And I did that in a way, I’ll show you the mask to try and create movement in there.

Let me just go ahead and cycle through all the mask here. You can see that, are there very few hard edges here. I’m painting on this mask, where the brush, the zero hardness. And I’m using brushes that are pretty big and using the feather edge of the brush. There’s only one mask here where you see me come in a very detailed way and make a really minor adjustment and I did that to this crack right here. Because I want to really bring this shape out and this is just a big eye just looking at the viewer that can really have a strong impact that I want to bring that out.

Here’s where we started and here’s where we ended up. Huge thank you to Edmund for submitting a beautiful sort of starting point of an image for us to play around with. Big thank you to all the people who participated in our Death Valley National Park Workshop. Big thank you to you for being here. Hope to see you again real soon on the Mindful Eyes Daily Critique.