Hi everybody, this is Craig Tanner for The Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. Today’s image was submitted by Mike who is an intermediate photographer. Mike says he went on a worldwide photo walk this past weekend in Red Bank, New Jersey. We would like to know more about that and I’m quite sure what that is but I think that’s a local organization or it was a worldwide photo walk bay or something I love to hear from Mike or somebody else, if you know just fix my curiosity.
Mike says that on his walk he was determined to take one street portraits this is not his personality to approach strangers. But he was actually taking a mural shot and he decided to ask this man if he could take his picture and he says obviously he said yes. He shot this with the Canon XTI10 on 17 to 50 zoom, a focal length of 47 millimeter so the effective total length is somewhere around 90 millimeters here.
And Mike shot this at F5 at 250th of a second on the question on how much and he says, “Do you like the composition?” He has one more question but I want to save that for a little bit later. Boy, there are so much that we can talk about today about this beautiful portrait, there's a lot that we can learn from this, a lot of takeaways.
One of the first things is just this idea of going past the fear so have of to Mike for identifying that this is outside of his comfort zone and then having the courage to go there. There so much created power for us as artist in human being in doing this. We go past fear for some kind of fear going past over not going to hurt anybody so much of our ability to achieve higher visions for ourselves to go on to the next level and whatever it is we’re doing is really based on belief. We have to first believe that we could even do it to start to act on it.
And the really cool thing about identifying self imposed limits base on fears and then trusting those limits is it can really help to grow our confidence which can really help to grow our belief about our self. So major hats off to Mike here for doing this work. The other thing that I want to mention right away is just couple of technical things. I think the focal link here is very interesting for doing straight photography. One thing that can get in our way is just the whole idea of peoples comfort in public places and culture has an effect on how far comfort zones extend away from our body in certain situations.
In this country if we already in the space where we’re close to people once people get inside of three feet can be pretty uncomfortable for us. But we are out on the street and more of the situation where it’s open that area of comfort can extend out as much as four, five, six, seven feet and one of the new things about this effective focal link of 90 millimeter is that to shoot away stuff shot here that gives you this really nice working distance. Mike is probably set to seven feet away here and that keeps just from a body language standpoint in its comfort zone standpoint to something maybe this more restricted from happening.
The other interesting thing here is the focal link and the aperture. We’re getting a flow of focus, what do I mean by that? Portrait subject is sharp, background back here at the mural is getting soft and it’s just one of many visual design elements connected to photography that we can work with to get our main subject and a portrait to separate from the background. I like the composition quite a bit here. Real class go placement at the main subject with the horizontal dynamic framing that the portrait subject and the dynamic place here right on third vertically and horizontally really close to this power point where two of the thirds in the image are intersecting sort of little bit west to that but not much.
And the other thing is just—there's a real powerful sense in terms of the flow of energy that’s very natural for the way we like to move. We like to start up here and start moving like this in this image. Obviously the main subject is up here on the top left. There is a real dynamic gesture here with the head tilted that makes diagonal out of all these lines at the mouth, at the bottom of the nose, the eyes, the eyebrows and that gets us moving in the natural direction top left to bottom right including the table over here helps to create this feeling of being able to move in a very natural clockwise circle. That works really well.
I love this environment of the portrait. I love getting all the way over this sort of doorway that can be a balance to the main subject. I love that work table here with somebody interesting things to give us more depth. A knife for curving just like this gentleman going wood curving I don’t know what that is, maybe a level, maybe a lighter to burn the wood or something sandpaper. These things are really interesting I love the way the table comes in here in sort of pushes back against the arm.
And the other thing that I love here and I can’t overemphasize this is the hands. You know in portrait subjects, the face has such a strong potential to suggest emotion and something about a person that’s important but hands have almost as much of an ability to do that. And the cool thing about hands is obviously different from the face so it’s another layer of story. And I'm really enjoying that but so many things to like about this.
I think about perfect well improvement. One of the things that I always think about when I photograph people is just variation. I must say that this person said yes and I started to spend time with them things that I encourage them to do. I think the knife is a really strong archetype it might be interesting to see this person just reaching out for the knife or working a shot whether a left hand comes out to do something over here and there's more of a circle. Some shots where he's looking at what he’s doing and maybe the hands come up a little bit higher in here, maybe going for vertical or more of the square where it’s just the hands and his face. Maybe a shot where it’s the hands and the work that he does and we focus on them to get real close and just let the face go out of focus. That was just some things to think about in camera while you're there.
Another thing that I'll do so much of the time now when I'm shooting portraits is I just quick take the camera and I say this is the camera relative to the same image for placing this way and just shoot a quick series of shots where I take the camera and rotate it on it’s access to see if there any that angle or oblique angle to the scene that might be exciting, so another thing that I might do. For me Mike second question that I'm going to say now really speaks to the other thing I want to change about this and Mike says, “Do you like the composition and what about converting this to black and white what steps would you take to do that?” And almost immediately when you think of black and white here I'm overwhelmed by the color.
You know, I want to back up for a second. I mentioned something about quality of life which is another take away from today’s critique. People that have darker skin tend to not only do well if I may made quality of life standpoint and a harder more direct quality of life at a lot of times that’s the best quality of life. You can see here that the 0651 the reflection of the light source in his face where the skin is very dark can create some—let me make that go away—can create some really beautiful local contrast in dimension and harm.
For one down there about the hard light here is that it’s creating this high contrast over lay on top of a very, very colorful background and I'm overwhelmed by two things here form the color standpoint. I'm overwhelmed by all the color, I'm also overwhelmed by the color cast is coming from I think the hard light reflecting off this real warm so 0721 color in the background. There some things that we could do, you know, we could come in and we could lower the warp in the background and leave it on the portrait subject, we can lower the contrast back there, we could add more the floral focus to soften the background, we could come in and sort of get rid of that overall feeling of too much red and darken something in the portrait subject to turn create more way then I came and added some blue, trying to create more of a harmony. But you know, so far this is what we done and I'm still overwhelmed by color.
And when I convert this to black and white boy does the background start to place so much better with the four grounds here. How do I do that I use the black and white adjustment layer. I think it’s a possibility I'm not committing to this but I may turn this into a great photo finish episode we’ll let you know if we do where I talk about converting this to black and white. One thing that I would say to remember here is that I'm adding this black and white adjustment layer at a point where I've done quite a bit of other work this having a big effect on how this comes out from the defaults standpoint to begin with.
So in other words I'll simplify things already and a lot of times that’s going to help when I convert to black and white. But in black and white, you know, one of the main things that happens in addition to obviously the over layer of color overwhelming the viewer is another thing that happens is this bit right here goes from something that’s very distracting to something that is very beautiful in the image. What do I mean by that? In color white is the absence of color but that’s anytime we have one thing is different than everything else, it’s incredibly visually powerful because high contrast has the most visual weight. It’s not just the difference between black and white the darkest things in the lightest things contrast can also be when one thing is different than everything else.
You got everything that sort of moving and you have something that rough. So white is different and in the shot like this then most everything else all this color the no color white is very bright and that goes to brightest areas pretty soon after going to the highest contrast area. So this and this scene represents the highest contrast bright and something that’s different and it just overwhelmed.
What so amazing is we got a black and white where white doesn’t have merely as much white. That area creates beautiful separations for this real done out of the face it creates on the sort of 0949 moving on from the arms and it rhymes the shape of the tattoo here that’s better settle. It also place up with the shape of the curve wood is had the totally different feeling.
So lots and lots of things to think about and the reason that we had so in great things to think about is Mike so general shot is just awesome. Again, a huge hands all to Mike for going pass to fear here that but thank to all of you for being here. I hope to see you again real soon on The Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique.
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