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 Jim who’s an intermediate photographer from the UK. Jim submitted this image as part of the Mindful Eye’s community assignment number 8, which was complimentary color. Jim says he shot this with the Nikon D80 and at ISO 100 using an effective focal light of somewhere around a 110 millimeters. Jim exposed the file at F13, for third of a second and used a split neutral density filter and a tripod and a remote release. And Jim says the low dawn sun just catching the tops of the wave as it headed toward the east beach. With pronounced where this is in Scotland, but I’ll probably just mispronounce it so somewhere in Scotland. He said just below dawn like catching this wave is what really caught his eye. One of the things that I’d love about this image is I bet it’s a beautiful combination of both the assignment concepts.
So you’ve got these really powerful scenes, blue and orange as the complimentary color pair which is a real classic in nature. And this is a complimentary color pair from the painter’s color where the mixing color will, you have a combination which is really a beautiful and in an incredible moment. I just love what’s happening, terms of the way the wave breaks up. Not only in terms of value but in terms of color, you get this really cool, sort of sense of almost a green that’s happening in the middle of the wave where it’s starting to curl there. Really beautiful since a spray coming off the top of the wave, there’s really dramatic sort of back side light, the really low light that Jim described in back story of the image. You have a really beautiful feeling in this image, repetition of this conturing line that’s happening in the image. It’s here; it’s obviously in the mountains.
The sky is really perfect for this, the clouds are framing the mountains and the way where you get another feeling of that quality of line. You see it’s small in here in these space shapes and you see it up in here even though it’s subtle and see it down here in the water. It’s a really beautiful feeling of repetition just in terms of this really striking quality of line. Something else I wanted to mention here from the technical stand point, is the fact that Jim, number one is shooting here by the third of a second and I found that shutter speed range to be really beautiful on a surf action. If you’re trying to preserve some of the texture and some of the detail, but then increase the shutter speed to simplify. It’s really funny I saw a little bit of a war break out on the blog the other day. It’s a place that attracts a lot of negative energy just because the person that runs it is regularly just against tons of things and of course that creates a reaction to the people that go there because there’s also really beautiful photography there. But somebody, you know, the side of the tech are really easy swiped at the idea of the cliché of photographers using a long shutter speed to blur water. The idea was that, that was unreal. Well the way the camera photographs water is not at all how we see water, if we freeze the motion, we don’t experience moving water like that and we don’t experience like this either. The reality of a steal photograph relative to things that are moving is that there’s always some form of an abstraction. We can sort of try and approximate what may be one moment would look like.
So I wanted to make that point about the idea of moving water more than anything. I wanted to make the point that for people who are interested in design and their actually courageous enough to try and make things with the picture will have to stand on its own. Not the kind of scenario where you set yourself on a pedestal that so high that people can even talk about your work. Then blurring water is so much about simplifying. Moving water, if you don’t blur it is almost always a high contrast subject because you do have areas that are bubbling and they can be next to areas that are in the shade. So you have all these areas of high contrast, if we freeze that, that quality of line increases the contrast any more and that can just overwhelm for the viewer or any of the other subjects in the image. I just love the shutter speed range, there are bunch of coastal shooting and shooting surf and I’m always so much of the time working around the third of the second or half seconds, 7/10 of a second, somewhere in there would just be really nice to get this combination. The other thing that’s interesting here is the use the split neutral density filter. You know in a shot like this, where large part of the image and one of the most important parts is about motion to shoot multiple frames and then try to blend that and all that is obviously going to be very difficult.
This is a classic example of why I still carry split neutral density filters and I think they’re critically important to the work of landscape photographers. Particularly when you’re shooting scenic and you’re ever going to be shooting in any kind of situation where it’s not practically to keep the camera still or there’s a large part of your shot is moving, so just too technical things I don’t want to mention. I wanted to do one other thing today just wanted to talk about, a little bit more about the idea of the initial weight of the frame before anything gets added to it and how we move around or before we even start to put subjects in the frame. I’ve thought quite a bit about this lately, we want to start here and end up here. Top of the frame has more visual weight because of gravity but this idea of sort of moving like this, very, very powerful and it’s just interesting in this image. You have a pretty flat negative space shape right here, right where we want to start. I think the image is a beautiful and it works really well but this is an image where flipping it creates a different feeling but it’s just interesting to see what happens. In some respects, in my mine’s side, it’s a little bit easier to start this image over here when you flip so that you’re starting highering and working your way down which is natural. That’s the natural movement that we make when we’re looking at an image and now the way breaking against the natural movement of us moving left to right. In some respects for me ends up taking on a little bit more power, but I’m really curious to hear Jim’s thinking about that and you’re thinking about that.
Obviously this is why I ended up being at editorial work, somebody could look at it but wait a minute, the mountains don’t run that way and that would be backwards. It’s just something to think about particularly in images where you could have the freedom because of the subject matter to flip and it’s not really going to become an editorial distraction to somebody. Then the other interesting thing is that I flip the mountains and didn’t flip the water and it’s just interesting to see how the implied visual pathway in between things a lot of times has more visual weight than the conturing lines. Here’s a conturing line, when I just flip the mountains and these two ideas stuck up on top of each other, it really become static. And what’s really beautiful about Jim’s capture, I sort say this will last for one of the things that I love. To me what worked so well is the fact that these hot points of energy are not lined up like these on a vertical. You have to move on diagonals to go back and forth between these areas and that tends to give a feeling of the image being a lot more dynamic.
I’d love to hear your feedback about the things that we talked about today. I want to say a big thank you again to Jim for submitting this image and a big thank you to all of you who are participating in the assignment area of the Mindful Eye’s website. I really appreciate your support, hope you have a great weekend. I hope to see you again really soon on Mindful Eye.
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