Hi everybody this is Craig Tanner for The Mindful Eye and the photo of the week on the daily critique. This week’s photo of the week was submitted by William who is an advance photographer from McCain, Georgia. William says that he was doing a volunteer photo assignment in a hospital and a remote village in Northern Ghana said this woman was about to undergo a surgery and could see in her eyes and body language that she was very nervous. And that made sense to have because he had been told that this was an absolute first for her.
Not only she should never been operated on before, she’d never even been in the hospital before. And he says that he ended up taking this image from a low to high angle for a couple of reasons. One, he wanted to frame her face with the light but he said that in addition to her seeming nervous. There are also seemed to be something about her and the way that she was sort of hysterically facing this that was angelic or heroic. And so the lot to high angle was also sort of about trying to evoke to that feeling or make that point. And William said, other people have looked at and I can’t take different things. I said, I guess it all depends on your point of view. He shot this with a 50mm lens at F18, exposed the file for 48th of a second and shooting at ISO 400 shot on Auto White Balance and de-saturated this in light room about 50%.
I know for myself when I saw this image, and for me, the images come in as submissions an email form so I have to open an email and then I opened an attachment. When I opened the attachment and I saw this image, it just sort of hit me over the head like a ton of bricks. It evokes so many emotions and what was amazing was when I read the back-story, the back-story was very close to the story I had already made up in my own mind out of this person who does look nervous but at the same time still look more like heroic. William’s word was actually angelic and so having this sort of halo or glow or light around her head from conceptual standpoints is very powerful.
From the design standpoint, it’s very powerful too. I want to come to the design part of it but I want to talk more about the power of this image to evoke in about some other things first to then sort of break the image down like we regularly do as part of the elements or design. There are several things I really want to emphasize about the submission just hearing William’s side that he’s volunteering; just the idea of serving something that’s bigger than yourself. With the things in your life that you love to do very-very powerful, I’d love to hear more from William about the bigger scope of the volunteering that he was doing. One of the main things as you want me to hear me say today is that we can photograph people and we can end up telling stories about them. They are all over the place. And they can either be very true to what we think is happening in the situation.
They can be very untrue to what we know is happening in the situation. They can also point to something that is bigger than the situation. And to me, this is one of these photographs. It reminds me of one of my photographic heroes, somebody I’d love to meet one day almost got a chance too couple of years ago in Atlanta. He came to speak--I was out of town it’s Russia Salgado is just to me a great example of a photographer over and over and over again has photograph people in situations like this, challenging situations. But people are still present it in a way were they’re heroic but they’re dignified or he’s pointing to with the photography a higher vision that we can of ourselves. And to me, that’s one of the big things that I get out of this photograph. It’s like William has taken her bravery and her courage and then he’s been able to transfer it to me as the viewer. And there are all different kinds of ways this could be photograph or that could be lost. So even in this moment to sort of to feel--I have this feeling that she’s been put up on a pedestal. To me, is very-very powerful and no that self serves the purpose of a high designed.
When you start to talk about just visual design, it’s the stunning image on that level. One of the things that I love about the light outside of this was the feeling like an angelic halo is the separation that it’s creating. And also the rhythm, her eyes are so powerful in this portrait. And this examination light completely rhymes that sort of it really accentuates this feeling that’s very evocative that we get when we look at the eyes. I think the overall feeling of color here without sort of being--this kind of green, yellow those are very kind of cold colors particularly when we think about it in this context—I mean so many people that have had a surgery. They thought about the archetype of feeling cold and just at that level of feeling unsteady. So the cold colors here and the de-saturation I think in a works of beautifully to sort of go with that kind of evocative feeling. And then, the other parts of this image, the negative space is back here in the ceiling or the wall.
This is really beautiful, the secular highlights and the sort of a statue us feeling of her shoulders and her upper dorsal, these shapes, these ideas are being rhymed. And this other negative shapes in the image even this secular highlights here are really beautiful to me in the way that they play off with the other negative space shapes in the back of the image; very-very powerful image on a lot of different levels. I think it’s a challenge when directly William didn’t say this for I think is a challenge for us to volunteer more with our camera. And I will say that we’re still trying to really get our legs under our self with Mindful eye with the thing had to be turn together so fast.
One of the things that we’re definitely wanting to do is when we launch our new community, which is coming up in a month there so the new software. We’ll have a link where we’re going to point two groups that are already doing volunteer work or you could join in work in progress to volunteer variety of groups that are already out there. But I’m very interested in the idea of the Mindful eye has a photo community coming up with an ongoing service project that we could be a part of. I have some ideas; we’d love to here your ideas about what that might be. So huge thank you to William for sharing us very powerful portrait with us on the Mindful Eye’s photo of the week on the daily critique, hope everybody has a great weekend.
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