Hi everybody this is Craig Tanner for The Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. Today’s image was made about Dennis who is an intermediate photographer from Russia. Only meta data we have here is at ISO 100. Dennis shot this at F8 at 1200th of a second.
One of the things I like right away about this image is just a feeling that I get from looking at it but it seems like it could be from another time. You have this, this scene, it's also very rural and very desolate. And then when you throw in the fact that it has been shot on black and white, you have a real powerful archetype church and you have a lone tree, starting to have a lot of things that could tend to have quite a bit of an emotional impact on the viewer in a lot of different ways and I think a lot of respects, those types of things sort of psychological things here are very, very powerful and I love the fact that Dennis did go to black and white here.
Black and white tends to allow people to have more of an emotional experience with the image. Colors tend to come with their own emotional baggage and make one to get rid of those, it’s, you go more towards in abstract but you go more towards something that can have a big psychological effect on the viewer, getting rid of the emotions that come with colors and I think the other thing that’s neat about black and white here is the fact that it’s obviously an overcast a day. And for shooting a big scene like this, whether it’s a landscape or in landscape architecture shot this real environmental dominant. It can be hard to get away with these big wide shots and flat light and color where you have an overlay of one color; black and white, we get rid of that and you have the difference between light and dark and it just doesn’t feels flat anymore and the viewer can take a real dramatic journey across the field following these qualities of line all the way out to the main subject and then you sort of have the counterpoint of the tree.
Also think it’s interesting that the tree is almost in a shape suggesting you know in a really big way, the idea that cross on top of the church and I think that that’s an interesting aspect of the mage.
This is an image that are really like just the way that it is but when I start to think about perfect or improvement for this image, I’d like to talk about a variation where we made it even more graphic. For me, as much as I like all the things that I’ve already mentioned, the image isn’t quite unified and for me as the viewer, I’d love to see to a variation thus where there is a little bit more of a graphic feeling and a unity feeling in the image and the main reason I’m saying that is because of how graphic and how powerful and how simple.
How powerful from an archetype of stamp point, how simple the structure is, one of the things that happens for me in this image is as much as I like a counterpoint to the church and really almost needs something on this side right now.
This is not only a powerful archetype, it’s only high contrast, it’s on the left and it’s in the top left. This has a lot of weight so I’m having something over here that can reflect it, so pretty neat idea but it sure wound be neat for me if the tree was more graphic.
One of the areas of the image that really starts to get my eye hang up is right in here, all this tendency. The intricacy of all the limbs of the tree sitting over these areas that aren’t covered by snow, all these starts to just really sort of flatten out, everything else over here is just so elegant and so simple and so graphic and then this sort of blacks up.
One of the things that I’ll do to sort of see of that’s true or to play around when I’m looking, it just balance in an image and I’m trying to forget that that’s a tree and that’s a church. I’ve mentioned this before because we’re doing again today, a lot of time, I’ll go on and I’ll rotate the image, I’ll just flip it. I might even flip it vertical up and look and see what’s happening and when I do that I can really start to say, ‘yah you know that one area is bothering me’ and you might think, “Well, what good is that doing us now that we can’t go back there?” Maybe this is a place that Dennis does have access to and maybe he can go back.
And the tree is something in the image, I bet if I was there, I might say, ‘yah beneath, to have a counterpoint over here but maybe I’ll just work with the quality of line or maybe I’ll move to another place and see what happens if I don’t have the tree in there.
The other thing that I wonder about here is as much as I’m enjoying the way of these ideas are playing off of each other in a way this can lead me out to the main subject. This is hard to get away with and what I’m talking about is I cut off corner. We have a big triangle in the corner and then let’s put the image in particular, I think this is hard to get away with. When this line leads us down to sort of heavy object here and you’ve got heavy object here, what happens for me is the viewer as I tend to come here and really get pulled over here because of the weight of these two things sitting right on top of each other.
If I get on the other side of this, it’s hard to come back, I get forced out of the image. When I get to here instead of getting down to this area and coming back around, it’s just a sticking point and that starts to make these blank triangle right here, even though it rhymes under the shape in the buildings, in the structure, the church, it just starts to come visually over whelming and I came in and I played around with the idea of curving this, I want to mention one other technical here is just a basic technical thing but I think it’s really important and then image where we have our architecture and the last we’re shooting from low to high and we’re getting obvious key stoning from doing that with a wide angle lens.
Anytime we’ve got our architectural subject eye in a scenic shot like this, it’s kind of be really difficult to get away with any feeling of things not being square and so one of the first things that I would do to this is I would just do and edit skew and straighten the horizon and square the church up in the corner of the frame and it makes a big difference. And to me, just that little detail and then I just did something very, very rough, I came in and I played around while trying to curve things in the corner and then get rid of that having this in the bottom, you know, here’s what we done so far but for me the tree, and I know there’s a time to duplication and I'm just doing this in terms of basically just a go by for a different type of foreground and what it looks like if we lose that real hard diagonal cutting off the corner.
But the tree in particular this area in here is sort of still pulling on me and that does really make me think about a composition where maybe I just come in and I just play over in here. Maybe I come in and I get really close to something and I get really low and you can see the lines going away when I play a seed head; dried out seed head on some grasses that comes up and breaks the horizon on this side, its’ a real dramatic wide angle shot and that helps to frame and also make a counterpoint to the church on the other side of the image but without able to walk around the field, hard to say, I mean another thing that I might think about here, two other things, is just take a ways that you could think about today is what about a horizontal. I’m seeing a lot of real dramatic lines out in here, maybe there’s a real nice journey, the viewer could take in a horizontal. It goes from right to left, out to this so that we loose the need for counterpoint because we have such a long line that leads the view around.
Maybe there’s a camera position we can find that and the other thing that I think off just from doing so much commercial shooting like this where I get hired to shoot small structures in the context of big landscape as is Peter could go back and there is something you could do here in color, add twilight where the difference between warm and cool out here in the field, I could really change the game here in terms of a composition.
Having settled that, the reality, their shot is that the twine that really sticks in my mind for all the things that I’ve mentioned in the beginning, it has a really stark and beautiful graphic quality to it.
I want to say a big thank you to Dennis for sharing this image with us on The Mindful Eyes Daily Critique.
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