Hi everybody! This is Craig Tanner for The Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. We’re going to be looking at two images today that were both submitted by Louis, who’s a beginning photographer from Ireland and they’re both portraits of horses. We’ll look at the second image in just a few minutes.
One of the things I wanted to do at the beginning of today’s critique is defined the visual design concepts of positive space shape and negative space shape. This is a very simple image with sort of one overall positive space shape and one overall negative space shape, so it’s a good image for us to talk about these things.
A positive space shape is typically a subject in our picture. It doesn’t have to be. We could take a picture that’s almost all negative space and the negative space itself could be the main subject. You don’t see that as much in photography, be real powerful choice to make as an artist because it’s different. But typically, our positive space shapes are our main subject to one of our subjects. And a positive space shape typically has two elements to it. It’s a quality of line that ends up becoming close to first make a shape and a lot of times at one side of the shape could be or will be the edge of the frame. In most photographs unless we’re just photographing something that is totally two dimensional within the positive space shape there’ll be the feeling of form and you have that here. Form is just an illusion of depth that’s being created by the difference between highlights and shadows within the shape.
A negative space shape is the space shape that’s either formed by the difference between the positive space shape and the edge of the frame and that happens in this image because when you go back here really don’t so much have quality of lines as you just have a texture. So there are no other shapes out here to get to before we get to the edge of the frame. So the background of this image, this whole idea moving all the way around is one big continuous very dynamic negative space shape and I guess more complicated than that because within most positive space shapes like the overall space shape of the horse we have other positive and negative spaces unless the horse just basically was a flat field cut out of a horse. We have a quality of line here that gets close. That becomes a positive space and then not much quality of line at all and then another quality of line that gets close, so positive space, negative space, positive space, negative space, another positive space shape and on and on and on.
One of the reasons I’m bringing this up in a critique today when we’re looking at a sample image is we can—when we’re first getting into photography get overwhelmed by the idea of just start subject and forget that we’re going to take the picture that’s going to forever fix not only our positive subject, positive space shape in one place is going to turn the negative space into an idea that’s fixed or static. And so it’s great to not just look at the subject but look at the space in between subjects and the space between your main subject and the edge of the frame and look and see if these negative space shapes are dynamic or are they boring. How is the color in those areas either harmonizing or not with everything else in the image. You know we can have a space shape that’s pretty flat. We can have a space shape that’s dynamic.
We could have a negative space shape like the one over here that does a really pretty good job, beautiful job of rhyming this space shape of the marking on the horse, so just some thoughts about positive and negative space. And look at this image I do like the simple separation. I also like the broad light I think broad soft light can work really well for portraits and I like the way that Louis is framing this and working with a very simple but powerful design out which is working off of the major diagonals. Get a real strong sense of it on this diagonal because of the end of the face of the horse, the nostril and the eye and pretty strong sense of it in this direction to the neck and the eye and the ear.
And to start to think about perfect world improvement for these images much as I like the separation on the background, this very bright background where we have a lot of contrast ‘because the horse is pretty dark. Say this rules don’t contrast together with the background and then very bright. For me, as much as I like the separation, the background starts to overwhelm the idea of the horse and also sort of the main subject that the horse to me which is the eye.
One of the things that we could do to mitigate that is we could work in Photoshop and add more of the feeling of form or local contrast on the face of the horse particularly this part around the eyes. So I’m just going to turn on a layer where I did a variety of things. And as I turned that on you can see the form of that part of the horse coming forward. You get an illusion that it’s moving towards you that there’s more depth and as that moves out it helps to keep the background from being so overwhelming. And I just did several different things that it curves adjustment and I plot it locally in here to create more of a feeling of a lighting pattern. I darkened this part of the horse so that you didn’t get pulled down here as much actually a sort of a dark visual stop and then go back to the eye, added some saturation to pop up the color difference between blue and warm. And that helps to make this more dynamic in here.
Another thing that we could do is we could look at a black and white conversion because on the black and white version of an image. The white doesn’t have as much visual weight as it does in the color file. Let’s look at other image that Louis submitted and this really sort of interesting because this background actually sort of addresses some of the concerns that I had about the other background. In this case instead of this being very bright and pulling you passed the idea of the horse. It’s bright but it’s not white. It’s also a color that compliments the color of the horse. By that I mean it’s an opposite color and this is cool and this is warm. So the horse is because this warm is more visually powerful than the cool even though its very light colored cool, very light in value. The horse is coming forward a lot more here.
It also doesn’t have the texture that you had in the other background that’s very visually dynamic and can compete with the texture in the local areas of the horse. This is more homogenous and it doesn’t compete with all these texture in the horse. Something else is really powerful from the design standpoint, great thing to remember if you’re sort of designing portraits and cameras. This is a way of working with color, the love to look for to just sort of find that’s existing on the street and there’s something from designing an image. And that’s the way colors are actually harmonizing here. You have a compliment of color here which you have a really cool harmony of color where this color on the bright light, this real saturated turquoise is harmonized by this real sort of understated scythe and that’s a great way to use harmony of color to make it very dynamic. Whether you have just this splash of a color here and then the whole background is made up of it or vice versa.
A lot of the color here and then just the splash of it to harmonize in the background, that’s a cool way to work with harmony of colors. So these are colors that are the same that compliments of color like these that are opposites. The one thing I’d like to change about this is I do like the dynamic, negative space of this background. And because Louis is shooting straight in here, the negative space in this image even though the background doesn’t compete as much with the horse is very flat. And so it’s almost like absorb like to combine the best elements about this portraits. Having said all that I like both of these portraits a lot, you know photographing any, their wild animal or even the tame animal, a livestock or pets to a degree of difficulty is so high and Louis has done a really beautiful job of creating simple portraits f both of these horses, a very beautiful. And we want to thank Louis for sharing these images on The Mindful Eye’s Daily Critique.
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