Hi everybody, this is Craig Tanner for The Mindful Eye and the Photo of the week on the Daily Critique. This is a week in the month where we feature on the photo of the week an image that was submitted for one of our community assignment.
So one of the things I want to say right away is we’d really love to have you. Number one join us in the community section of The Mindful Eye website and a really great way to participate there is to take on an assignment. And this beautiful image was submitted by Alexandra who’s an intermediate photographer from Atlanta, Georgia. This is a shot that Alexandra made for assignment number 10 and the assignment was to work with your favorite color as a concept and not very hard to guess here that Alexandra favorite color is blue. In the back story she says “I love blue, my living room is decorated with blue colors. I visited the monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia and I was attracted by the blue stained glass windows and the light coming through them.” She said, “I wondered if it was possible to capture that light.” So it turned out that photos came out a lot more blue than the way it look to her eye. She checked photos in the monastery website and most of them have a real strong blue cast and she goes on to say she shot this with Canon XSI 17 to 55 zoom lens at 17 millimeters on the crop body that turns up to be around 28 millimeter semi-wide and at F8 and on the tripod it goes the file for 8/10th of a second.
The blue here is really beautiful but a big part was making this image very powerful for me is the yellow-orange and also this real powerful color complimentary fair blue and orange. It’s one of the more dominant complimentary color pairs in nature because this quality of light is something on a clear day that we see just about everyday. Near the end of the day the sun starts to as it gets caught up in the atmosphere, turn very warm and then you have the blue reflected from the rest of the sky.
And so this is a color pair that has an enormous affect on it psychologically, so a really powerful concept to an architecture to play blue and orange off with each other, you'll see this over and over again and interiors. A lot of times you'll see this twilight interior where you get a real strong sense of orange. And the interior and blue in the windows is kind of a fun reversal of that in the shot. But one thing that’s true about this yellow-orange is it really has a powerful pull on us.
We don’t just have the idea of color there like color opposites driving the illusion at depth and the image who also have emotional archetypes that come with colors and one of the powerful things about yellow-orange is psychologically it just reminds us of the warmth of a fire or of a candle. It makes us think about a space so much of the time psychologically that’s warm, that’s safe and so very, very powerful both from a psychological depth standpoint and image design standpoint just the space, shape and the color of it, such a strong feeling of being able to move through the space.
I love Alexandra’s framing here. I think a really beautiful job. And a symmetrical way because there’s a lot of symmetry within the shot but there’s a really beautiful feeling and sort of symmetry in terms of the amount of the floor and the amount of the ceiling just this real simple kind of three-part design with the payoff at the end and I really enjoy that.
It’s really fun for me to how the reflections are playing out here and how this reflection kind of comes in, in between the windows here and breaks up this negative space. I love the vertical frame into come up and get the repetition of the art ways. Great exposure here, you know, I don’t know how much work Alexandra had to do this in Photoshop but if she didn’t do a lot then she's done a really beautiful job with the exposure and time of day. It’s just a really beautiful sense of some detail still on the window and the stained glass there, subtle detail in the shadow with getting to appear black point in a couple of place in his image.
And a really beautiful subtle movement all color across this archways. I love the way not only the quality of light changes and the contrast changes but the color of the light changes. Something else that would be really cool in a big print now you can hardly see in the video. This icon, this archetype is such a powerful archetype and the cross repeats down here at the end of the image and that’s really powerful.
You know, on a perfect, perfect world I wish we could just come in and square this side up. This side looks pretty square, maybe just playing around with the edges here. But I think Alexandra, considering she's just working with the regular lens no tilt-shift lens or anything here. She's done a really good job about squaring this up in camera because I don’t think a lot of post processing according to the back story has been done here.
One of the things that a shot like this makes me think about because it makes me think of my favorite architectural photographer of all time Peter Aaron and Peter Aaron was very famous in this big interior shots of his and even a few very, very well known in the likes of architectural photography exterior shots who is very famous for putting a figure sort of back in the shots somewhere to give it scale and it just kind of give a sense of life and a Peter Aaron shot, there maybe a person that’s slightly blurred just moving through the space, something like that. And this space does make me think about that sort of an idea along that line.
I just want to say a huge thank you to Alexandra for participating in the community section of the site. I'd like to invite you one more time to be a part of our community and I just want to say a big thank you to all the people that are participate there. You know, the thing about it is when you do something like that you might be amazed because it’s the internet and I've learned this on a very direct way over the course of the last four years.
You just might be amazed how just sharing one of your pictures might give somebody else the courage to be a photographer. It might change their whole life if all of you ever did was just put one picture online. Somebody might see that, it might be a moment for them where their move by the beauty of it or just by your courage of participating and it’s the last push they need or the last sort of inspiration that they need.
I know that it might sound over dramatic but I've seen that happen in my own teaching. And so I just really encourage you to let go of your fear and understand it. I know that scary to share your work but if you sort of putting that in the context of thinking about how it could be an incredible service for somebody else that might be scared just like you. You know, the real powerful concept and I want to say a personal thank you to all friends of mine that have helped me get over my fear of playing my music out.
A big, big fear of mine and I've been working through that in a last few months and it’s really made a big difference in my life. So, a big thank you to everybody that supports Mindful Eye and anyway, even if you just come and download content I'm just really grateful for you being here. I hope you have a great weekend. I hope to see you again real soon in Mindful Eye.
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