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 Peter who is an intermediate photographer from Sweden and Peter actually created this image for the assignment feature of the Mindful Eyes Community. Now, you're not aware of the shadow, you don’t spend time on our community, if you’ll click on community in the menu bar on the homepage and then go to assignments, you’ll see that we’re up to assignment no.4; the theme for this assignment was smile and we’ve had a quite a few great submissions and so I know I’m getting ahead of myself here but I wanted to go ahead and feature this image and we’ll be featuring another image from this small assignment and some honorable mentions on the photo of the week in a couple of weeks from now.
Peter shot this with an Nikon D80, we don’t know the lens and Peter says that this is an image of his daughter. Says she’s playing and then a parenthesis sliming on the piano and he says I think this image makes you smile because of the small girl and the big heavy piano.
This image, definitely made me smile but it really sort of made me smile from a place that has a lot of depth to it, it wasn’t just a, ‘oh I get it’ and a smile and then it’s over. This is an image that really sort of seeps into my consciousness.
One of the things that I love about this image is the juxtaposition of the little girl and it’s not just a little girl sitting up a piano, it’s this view which is I think very profound and but that I mean, you have the little girl, she’s not only sitting at the big piano but she’s sitting in the middle of the bench, she’s centered on the piano and Peter has shot this in a very formal way and I can over emphasize how much the camera position here and her gesture which is basically very just straight up and down, almost like a concert pianist beginning of formal piece. How much all of that adds to the power of juxtaposing, these two concepts.
The other thing that I love here is the fact that it’s in black and white, very, very powerful, you know, for going for emotional or you want to affect people to psychological level, we’ve talked a lot about this, black and white a lot of times has more potential to do that because it’s abstract and we get rid of the psychological and emotional baggage of the colors automatically calm her so much of the time.
Another thing that I really love about this image is the stunning quality of light on Peter’s daughter here. You’ve got a light and what looks like a some kind of really interesting fixture that’s sitting on top of the piano, it’s creating a really beautiful pattern of light in the top of the image; it’s really interesting to held this idea, sort of rhymes Peter’s daughter’s head in the image and then you’ve got what looks like window light coming in, creating a really beautiful accent here, you’ve got another light that’s coming here, you have this real dimensional light of on the shape of Peter’s daughter, almost you know, similar to what we would get if we were you know, shooting more of a standard portrait or shooting somebody straight on and what I mean by that is when you look at this, you seem to get a sense of a kicker light here and then the dimensional light here, we’re just not seeing the face here but it really sort of beautiful how there seems to be this effect of a front light and then a kicker light to give dimension, so there was a great sense even though Peter is shooting straight in here of a beautiful separation of his daughter from the piano and you could get a sense of compression by it cannot over emphasize what the light is doing for this image and just wanted to take away from today’s critique is not really starting to try and slow down and see the light before you take pictures, see opportunities where light can work this kind of a magic and create layered effects in images, really beautiful what’s happening with the shadow over here, I love that, it’s almost a repetition of sort of the idea again of Peter’s daughter happening every here whether or not that is the shadow, maybe its’ just coming from this, when you get all this writing out of the way here. This is a really beautiful subtle, sort of psychological repetition of Peter’s daughter.
And the other thing I’m enjoying about this is that you do have a real strong sense of formal symmetry obviously, in this part of the image but then you have a tension and that formal symmetry gets broken up and the stuff that’s running across the top of the piano, it starts to give us a lot more depth to other places to go to; I love the little replica, the piano here.
These are really interesting objects in it of themselves and I love the way the way they're spread out and something that first bothered a little bit when I looked at the image was this part of the image and I said, you know, got it so formally symmetrical, wouldn’t be cool if this just repeated over here but I actually played around with doing that in a very rough way in Photoshop and it kill the shot; it just did something in terms of making it more of a one note kind of shot instead of me being able to psychologically move around and after I spent some more time with the image, it leaves for myself personally I started to see to how this part of the image does a really beautiful job of rhyming what Peter’s daughter is wearing just in terms of the check pattern and the graphic quality of these, you know, hard edge lines and rectangles and so on and so forth that you get in a plod. And it’s really interesting to just see this shape; there’s a lot in the rhythms in this image once you slow down and start to look.
Something else I really enjoy about this is just the fact that there’s a little bit of detail down in here, this image as I spent time whether I started to see more and more detail; the bench is fascinating, I love the radiator over here, just kind of everywhere that I went in the image, it let me because of these details, I just had a richer and deeper experience with the image and something else, you know that I’ll say here is clearly subject matter has a huge effect on the viewer, I mean, what we choose to photograph and just the archetype of music, just all by itself, just the idea of the piano being here, very powerful for all kinds of people, just because of how powerful music is in our lives.
A really wonderful image and you know the last thing I’ll say is that because of the way Peter has shot this, it’s not just over the shoulder, it’s from behind and clearly it lets the viewer go to all kinds of places in terms of imagining what is happening in terms of expression and the mood of this little girl, it lets people just project all kinds of stories there connected to their own life, people they’ve know, a person that you’ve been when you were younger and on and on and on, very, very powerful the idea of showing us something in terms of the little girl and the heavy piano, that’s one juxtaposition, but another juxtaposition here is the idea of showing us something in a very literal straight forward way but then leading out a very important component and not telling the whole story and letting the viewer fill in the gap in a way where each person can tell a story about this image, it just gives a whole another level meaning to it potentially and that’s way powerful.
The couple other things that I want to say today, one is just the concept to photographing things that are available to you and you know, trying to become more creative by potentially sort of staying out of this mode of photography is something that happens away from home or in beautiful places and so on and so forth.
The idea of what’s available to you as a photographer, the idea of home, the idea of the familiar, the idea of the ordinary, not that there is anything ordinary at all to me about this image but in terms of access, you know if we think if of the word ordinary but then we just start to be more creative and the other thing I’d really like to encourage you to do is to participate in our community at any level but we’d love to have you participate at the level of assignment; no they’re part of few people that e-mail from time to time and they say correct another workshop support The Mindful Eye so far and you know I’m just, I live too far away to do a workshop or I don’t have the money to do a workshop, if you download from the site and that’s all that you do, we’re thankful that you’re here. It gives an outlet for what we do and we’re deeply grateful for that; there’s nothing else that needs to happen but if you start to feel like you know I would like to give back but there’s point in time, I don’t have any money to do it, I’m not going to take the workshop then I can’t tell you powerful it might be if all you did was from time to time, you just submitted an image to the community forum because every time you do something like this, it has the potential to inspire, it has the potential to have an effect to anybody. It could be the one little tipping point that keep someone shooting and photography for some people might be something that really is helping to keep them connected to the thread of joy in their lives so we’d love to have you participate in the assignments and I’ve been amazed at all the picture that we’ve seen already, I think it’s just a great way to be more creative.
I want to say a bog thank you to Peter for sharing this wonderful image with us and I want to say a big thank you to all of you for being here with us on the Mindful Eye and hope you’ll have a great weekend. I’ll be seeing you again real soon everybody.
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