Hi, everybody this is Craig Tanner for the Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. Today’s image was submitted by Roger who’s an intermediate photographer from the United States of America; we have the back-story and metadata on this one.
Roger created this image at Cannon Beach in Oregon and Roger worked for the full frame since your camera, the Canon 5D. He used a 17-40mm zoom lens and shot this at 22mm so it’s a super wide-angle shot and Roger did three things here to slow his shutter down to get these motion effects on the slur. He stopped the lens down to F16, he used the lowest ISO setting on this camera; ISO 50 and he used a neutral density filter.
Neutral density filter is a filter that blocks light from hitting the sensor your digital camera and one of the most popular ways we can think off creatively using a neutral density filter is to do what Roger has done here. Block the lights so that he can get a slow shutter and imply a beautiful motion blur in the shot and Roger used a specialty neutral density filter that as one of my favorite filters. It’s made by Singh-Ray; it’s called a Vari-ND. It allows you to, on one filter, vary the amount of neutral density from two to eight stops.
That does a couple of things for you. It obviously gives you a bung of different neutral density filter strengths in one filter but also gives you the ability to open the filter all the way up to its brightest setting. Compose your shot and if you need a lot more neutral density, stop it down, take the shot and then open it back up again. With normal neutral density filters you’d have to take the filters on and off; screw them on and off in front of your lens. We’ll put up a link to that particular filter in the information paragraph about this video, if you’d like to go find out more about the Vari-ND.
Let’s talk about the elements of visual design in this image. One of the things I love I’ve already pointed out is really beautiful, repetitive, leading minds of emotion blurs. That kind of hooks up with this dark area out in here in the water and that leads over to the sea stocks and then that brings us up to these really beautiful diagonals that move in this direction. So even though, there’s not a literal s curve in the image, there’s an implied visual pathway that’s very powerful that works with this real powerful quality of line. The s curves that can help it move us all the way through images.
So beautiful foreground, beautiful qualities of line, I love the fact that Roger shot this in black and white. I think it’s a great choice on an overcast day like this particularly when you have this much definition in the sky and I’m saying that because this is a big literal scenic shot. And if we were shooting this in color with this soft wrap around light hitting everything.
The difference between highlight and shadow and warm and cool light in color files, one of the things that help to create it, the illusion of depth and so when the light flattens out. I t can be hard to create a feeling of depth in a color file.
The other thing is true about he’s going to black and white in a situation like this where the light is maybe soft of flat. Black and white is immediately abstract and because of that, we have more leeway to manage local and global contrast in the scene and we don’t have to worry about validity. When we go to maybe make radical changes in local and global contrast and color where all the colors are mutually depending on each other can be harder to get away with those kinds of big contrasts changes.
The other thing I like about this image is the classical dynamic placement of these two subjects on thirds in the image and I like the relationship between the two being dynamic. This being bigger but they’re being two these over here the implied diagonal movement and how that crosses hatches with the feeling of diagonal movement in the clouds. Cross hatching diagonals is a real sort of classical way to create more depth in an image, creating an illusion that the viewer can move into the picture in addition to moving the two dimensions of sort a cross and up and down.
When I start to think about improvement for this image is really not so much improvement, it’s another variation. I’d like to create a variation of it. For me, it feels a little bit more balanced and also slows the eye down a little bit. As much as I love this composition, one of the things that’s happening for me is that like more viewers I’m going to go to the area of highest contrast first.
From the scene no matter or where I would start to look at this, I quickly get pulled over here and when I get pulled over here, there’s blur high contrast. There’s also a corner that’s almost cut off here; it comes very close to being cut off and so if I get pulled out into here, there’s nothing to stop me. It just keeps getting brighter and brighter all the way to the corner and if I try to come back, it’s hard to get past this real hard line, it’s really the difference between almost pure white and pure black.
And so that’s one area of the image I’d like to change, I’d like to, sorry about that. I’d like to darken this down just a little bit our good Bit and here. And I also like to create some feeling of form in the movement that can bring the eye back. I’m going to end up sort of pushing this to an extreme by changing the image content over here. Also creating a rhythm between the form that’s here, form that’s here and form that’s here so there’s even another level of encouraging the viewer if they get over here to ping pong back and forth and to move about through the image.
The other thing that I’d like to do that I just mentioned is to open this up. You see when I look at the image right now, in addition to this area pulling me out, something else is happening, there is sort of a flat space shape here that’s very dark. The bottom is divided into two areas that are, one is very dark and one is very light and then this area up in here for mw even though there’s some form in there. It’s pretty gray and what I’d like to do is by changing the local contrast and lightening and darkening, I’d like to at one time, slow the viewer down a little bit and create a little bit more of a feeling of cohesiveness or visual unity.
When I think about balance in the most basic sense, particularly in a big shot like this, literally we just sort of do a drill in my mind where I’m looking through the camera trying to see the image. Like it’s going to printed and think where is my balance light from top to bottom, what is it like from side to side, what is it like moving on a major diagnose and then I may go a lot further than that. I may start thinking about minor diagonals or balance from here to here and so and so forth.
And so what I’m going to do is I’m going to turn on two layers that combine a lot of adjustments and to show you the look that I’m going for here. Talk a little bit more about it and then if you visit the digital darkroom this week on The Mindful Eye, you’ll see a tutorial that I’ve created where I specifically show you how I made some of these adjustments.
First layer that I’m going to turn on is a combination of a couple curves adjustments where I did the most basic things that I talked about. You can see here that I came in, I’ve darken this corner. I created a little more form and contrast in here so this wasn’t as flat gray. I created more contrast in here and brought this values out so this wasn’t, it is just sort of flat black and I’ve added a little bit more detail in here and now in this next layer. I’m really going to push that even further, I’m going to darken this down, I’m going to lighten this up and I’m going to have a little manipulate the photograph but some people won’t like.
In addition to opening this way up, I’m going to take this sky, cut it out, flip it, put it over here to create more of a feeling of rhythm from this to this to this. Let me go ahead and turn that layer on and I’m going to turn this on and off a couple of times.
And this is a lot of manipulation, it won’t be some people’s cup of tea but the main reason that I wanted to work with this image today and to take away is. It’s just in the most basic sense; how contrast, local contrast can really drive a lot more of a feeling of apparent form which can slow the viewer down. It can give them more of a feeling of depth and moving over and around and not during through things and we can also work with local contrasting and overall contrasting, a very powerful way to create more of a feeling of visual unity or cohesiveness but in fact that’s what we’re going for.
So here’s where we start it and here’s where ended up and I love Roger’s version of this shot, very beautiful framing, a great use of motion and really beautiful use of quality of line. I want to thank Roger for submitting this image to The Mindful Eyes Daily Critique and see you tomorrow everybody.
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