How to Keep Your Images Simple
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 Rick who is an advanced photographer and we have the metadata and the back story on this one. Rick shot this with an effective focal length of 15 mm, super wide at ISO 100. He stopped down to F22 and exposed the file for a half second and I’ll give you a little bit of a back story now and a little bit more in just a minute.
Right very recently created this image on the Mindful Eye Zion National Park workshop. Right when I look at this image one of the things I love about it is just how simple it is and having just a few ideas can really make our life easier. You know one of the things particularly in a landscape setting that can start to make a shot fall apart is just a lack of unity or cohesiveness.
And when from the very beginning, we get to an area or get to a place and then work with our camera position in our lens to pair the shot down just in terms of maybe one or two main subjects that can make our life a lot easier and recast that here and really just the water and then the rock. That’s an anchor on the lower left hand corner.
The other thing that I’m enjoying about the image is in the water itself you’ve got an overall filling of really just a few shapes. You got a few really beautiful elegant shapes out here in the water where the water is roughed up and we’re getting this quality of line and this filling at a half second with the implied motion.
And then just a few negative space shapes in the image but then after you get past here, there is sort of an overall simplicity in terms of the big shapes. There is an incredible richness of detail in terms of textures and one of the things to me that is so elegant about this image is there is a really beautiful feeling of rhythm in the shapes that are here. There are not many shapes but you either going to start looking at this image out here in a high contrast or at the rock and then everywhere you look there is a feeling of this wedge shape that you see in the rock.
Sometimes it’s elongated, other times it’s almost just like the rock but everywhere you look in the big ideas and the small shapes it’s a whole series of these wedges. Sometimes it becomes very, very soft but it really doesn’t matter if you just keep looking that wedge shape is implied almost everywhere and then there’s also a really beautiful harmony of texture, the richness in this image after the simplicity of not many subjects and not many shapes.
The richness of this image comes in a form of texture to my eye and you’ve got sort of this rough up mosaic texture here. It’s repeated at the shutter speed out here and this part of the water also over in here on the top of the water out in here and then over on this side of the image. There’s a much more of the feeling of sort of elegant feathered linear lines and now it gets repeated out here in the darker part of the water.
And there’s a really beautiful balance that’s dynamic between the two fillings of texture. The other thing that I’m really enjoying and this maybe harder to see in the video if you download the high quality version of this it maybe easier to see but we don’t know how easy to see in the streaming version.
There are some really beautiful colors here and they’re not many colors at all but there are some really beautiful colors in terms of compliment. I love the way the rock at one time has some warm even though it’s very subtle. It also has a little bit of green which is a color that is analogous to all this cool tons out in here and it is really sort of amazing when you get to the water. You have kind of a feeling of blue green but then in some places where the water is pacing in different directions you pick up this feeling of a warm tonic. It comes back and picks up some of the worms in the rock and so even the right when you look at this you kind of get a feeling of earth tones. It’s a little bit warm and a little bit of green and maybe kind of overall sort of blue as you go into the image. It’s sort of like the difference between the simplicity of the shapes and the complexity of the texture if you kind of looking at this from a distance, the color seems to be incredibly simple but if you get closer to this there is an outrageous richness of colors. It undulates back and forth between cool and then warm again and cool and warm.
And that really draws me deep into the image. Let’s talk a little bit more about the back story. You know on our national park workshops, we will scout locations that maybe inherently beautiful, maybe popular locations. We try to go to other locations that maybe aren’t so well known and we also try and play back and forth between people just having a free shoot and being able to shoot whatever they want and we play that off as assignments and assignments that sort of challenge each person participating in the workshop to maybe shoot in a way that’s more conceptual.
And this image came out of an overall assignment that we have on our National Park Workshops. We have daily assignments for both of our shooting sessions but we also have a portfolio that’s turned in on the last day of the workshop and people come up with the concept in the beginning of the week and as they’re doing their other assignments.
They just shoot all week long for this portfolio and the name of Rick’s portfolio concept was “Reflecting Black” and so the really interesting things to me about this image is that if you were there and you we’re seeing Rick shooting this, if you were just looking at it with your eyes it would look much more open than this and because Rick has a concept he’s looking for scenes where he can maybe with a combination of exposures shutter speed and camera angle and then post processing push his portfolio towards this concept of reflecting black, the work has the potential to in my mind when it becomes more conceptual to become more personal. They become less about the place and more about something that you’re expressing that can also touch other people in a way that is more personal and maybe more emotional.
If you’re shooting 15 mm in the main canyon at Zion National Park, it’s just so tempting to go up and get the canyon walls but here working more conceptually shooting part of the scene and starting to abstract that would an exposure that’s maybe a lot darker than someone might do if they’re just kind of trusting their meter to look at things and see medium and then coming in and doing post processing where we’re really starting to push this darker areas in the image towards sort of a low key negative space around this higher key space shapes. Pushing things to a black, you end up with something in a lot of ways relative to what we were seeing and request their shooting. This is much more abstract and a lot more personal.
And just really overall for me in a lot of different levels, a very evocative image, an image that are on one hand is very, very simple but then as I get closer to it there’s a depth to this and there’s a complexity to it. This is very powerful so you know there are a lot of takeaways to me from looking at this image but I think two of the most powerful is keeping it simple but also giving yourself things that are conceptual, conceiving of shots first or conceiving of an idea for shots and then going out and looking for the things that match with your concept and that can really help you to not only engage the process that can keep you from getting black. It also can start to push your working at a direction I think that’s more personal and more evocative.
I want to say a big thank you to all the people who have participated on the Mindful Eye Zion National Park Workshop and a big thank you to Rick for being generous enough to share this really beautiful landscape image with us on the Mindful Eye’s photo of the week on the Daily Critique. Have a great weekend everybody.
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