Hi everybody, this is Craig Tanner for The Mindful Eye and The Daily Critique. I'm going to do another self critique today. I posted this image to my blog at lightdarry. I got some interesting feedback that motivated me to want to create another self critique. I shot this image at a location called Upper Emerald Pool in Zion national Park. I had a few days off after teaching a week long workshop in Zion. I did some personal shooting; this is one of the images that I’ve created. I want to take this chance to say a big thank you to all the people who participated in that workshop.
Let's get right into the critique, talk about what I like first. What really motivated me to take this picture was the side light. I was already shooting in the location bu I framed this shot based on the side light that’s coming in here on the water, hitting in here, we’re not seeing the reality of it. This is behind the rock with real dramatic side light on the sort of leading edge of these trees in the scene. I love the way it’s more subtle, the way light is playing out on the trees that we can’t see in the image.
The other thing that I like about this image is the square crop and how its emphasizing a real basic element of design that can make things sort of dynamic and that is the feeling in this image with that centered high contrast rock and these other implied visual pathways. The crosshatching of diagonals in the image, I'm also enjoying the difference between the dynamic greens and the dynamic oranges. I also like the way from this camera position these Cotton Woods appear to wrap around and rhyme to one of the main ideas in the image.
What was the feedback that I’ve got that motivated me to want to do a self critique, people generally didn’t like this shot. A couple of people came in and made specific comments and they both said the same thing. Floe said I don’t like this as a subject, it’s overwhelming. I looked at it and initially I didn’t even know what this was. This changes so much because the quality of light. Floe said that this is not completely incongruent in the image and out of place. And Tim came in and totally agreed with Floe, he said I get what this is, I get that its probably low light in a specular way reflecting off of this rock but it almost looks like science fiction or metallic. And in the context of an image where everything else seems very real, where a rock seems like rock and trees seems like tree, and water like water. With this being very high contrast, being right in the middle of the image and seeming surreal it just overwhelms the rest of the whole shot.
In addition to those two bits of feedback, you might think well those are just two people, its two people that gave me feedback a lot of times so a big part of what this presentation is about today is, becoming a better editor of your work and also doing a better job of getting more out of the feedback process. One of the things about feedback that is true for me big time is who is giving me the feedback. Is it somebody that’s very familiar with my work, are they familiar with the kind of work tat I do, and are they one of the trusted person in terms of being honest with me and giving what I think is a good combination of support but also just honest about how they feel about the image. Floe and Tim both fit into that category but there’s something else that’s even more important.
On a blog, you might get a lot of traffic. I get somewhere around 600-700 hits a day depending on what’s going on to The Mindful Eye of wether I’ve posted a video cast, so on and so forth. A very few people commented, that’s just the nature of a blog but what I can do is check my site statistics and see how many people click on in a given image, that’s called the page view.
In addition to Floe and Tim’s sort of not liking this and saying they didn’t, this image got a very few page views relative to what images that resonate with people get. So all that leads me to think that this is not working on average, did you not recognize this was an issue, so another thing that I wanted to talk about today relative to feedback and becoming a better editor of your own work is how a very heightened experience when we’re taking pictures can sort f bias us towards either really liking an image or maybe pushing it more than we should or choosing it when their other images that might be better. And boy, this is a classic example of that very kind of thing.
I'm an introvert, I love teaching, I love being around people but I'm naturally introvert, that’s draining to me and I need solitude to recharge and sort of my comfort and recharge is being by myself. And particularly being by myself in nature and so I got up the first morning after the workshop, hiked into this location in the dark, I had two hours at this location before any other hikers got there. That was amazing; the soundscape of this place is absolutely incredible. Its’ high Cannon Walls, very sort of kind of grotto-like box Cannon so there’s a lot of nature river. That was magical.
I was behind this rock for about an hour. I never thought the sun was going to come in to this location in the winter at all in a direct way. And because I was behind the rock I didn’t see the sun starting to work its way around the Cannon wall’s little opening and so this side light that happen all of a sudden was very dramatic. All those things made me really want to try and transfer all those feelings to the viewer and this sort of takes this idea even further. This was the raw file that I’ve worked with; you can see this is terrible.
A part of the reason why I cropped it was that after the fact that this turned out that this really didn’t balance with anything else in the image and I and a huge problem with color in a lot of these shots, with all the reflected reds sort of just polluting the overall colors. So it took a lot of work to clean all that up and you can tell from looking at these two that that’s a lot of work in photoshop. So, it’s not just that I chose the image instead I end up spending a lot of time on photoshop and then posting it to my blog and then people don’t like it. So, what do you do? This is completely relative to what it is that you’re trying to say and what it is that you’re trying to accomplish with your pictures and if the overall feeling of peace or calm or beauty is being taken away by a visual design element in this picture.
Then, hopefully what I do is I learn from it and I don’t continue to show this image to people and then pitch your temper and go crazy. I spent 42 years on my blog making the same point everyday about not liking feedback about a certain type of image. Hopefully what I do is I work with the information to accomplish the real work which is to actually as a photographer. It’s not about each individual image, it’s more about am I making progress. And I can make more progress if I can wear two hats, one I can be completely emotional invested and be totally into it but then when I need to I can put on another hat and step back and go, okay now is the time for me to step back and listen. If I was trying to say this about an image that I had all of these emotional investment in but its not being transferred then how did I missed the mark, what can I do in the future to do a better job of transferring the feeling and so, and so forth.
I did take a variation of this image and this got better comments and a heck of lot more page views. I shot it right after I took the first image and they are from a sort of a practical standpoint now to make this more practical. There are a couple of things are helping this to work better. One, I’ve gone away from the literal so much. I don’t have this big visual sea level in the image where people can sort of start to potentially compare the real and the unreal.
The other thing that’s true about this image is that now my high contrast is very heavily weighted. The graphic is much more of an exciting shape and instead of not going with the other things in the image that harmonizes or rhymes a lot of the dominant feelings of shape in this image. The star effect has rhymed by all of these feelings. I’ve real string obtuse pointy triangles in so many different places in this image and the quality of light over here in the opening in the Cannon that the sun is coming through over here in these leaves and so and so forth. And so the idea of going away from the literal and understanding how powerful high contrast is and having a subject like that work with other things in the image ends up working better.
I would love to hear your thoughts’ about how feedback affects you and what it is you’re trying to say in your images. I love to hear your thoughts about how emotional investment in an image might bias you to choose images that don’t work so much or continue to push an image that’s not working and the feedback loop. All those things to me are really fascinating and I think there are things that can really help us if we think through them and we were aware of them to become better communicators.
I want to say a big Thank you to being here with us on The Mindful Eye’s daily critique. I hope to see you tomorrow everybody.
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