Hi everybody this is Craig Tanner for the Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. Today’s image was submitted by Jose who’s a beginning photographer from Spain. Jose says that he was on a beautiful in the Southeast of Spain. It had a beautiful sunset, he end up shooting away from the sunset. So I want to talk more about that and a little bit. This is essentially the Eastern sunset and Jose says that he had a beautiful cloud; we see it there in the background of the shot. He said that he consciously tried to get a breaking wave to create some symmetry or repetition with this cloud he also said he consciously composed this rock into the shot so that it would lead out o the most dynamic place in the cloud here on a diagonal and a dynamic way and Jose shots this with a Canon 10d, 19 to 278 mm off o the conversion this around a 30mm shot, semi-wide f16 as so 101 quarter of a second. So really, important thing to remember here you just get it into shooting landscapes. Just remembering this focal length, this kind of motion; basic surf action in a quarter of a second is creating this kind of a look on the water and it’s a really good starting point if you are trying to simplify the surf action a little bit by slowing it down without killing all the texture. Quarter of a second, half second somewhere in there was a good going to remember. Jose shots this from the tripod and he was also using a polarizer.
Let’s get right into it. I love the shot. Really beautiful—I love the repetition that Jose went for here. I think it’s gorgeous. One of the thins that I also love in addition to the placement of this rock, on about a 3rd in the image and it’s doing a very beautiful job in a dynamic way anchoring the shot but also balancing. So the idea of informal symmetry, the rock is kind of balance the whole cloud point to it in a dynamic way. It’s not just that, it’s also that the flat shape of the rock, contouring lines in the sense of form in here creates a whole series of repetitions—it rhymes the shape of the cloud, it rhymes the shape of a lot of the movement down in here. It plays off of these textures out here in the middle ground in a way that it’s really beautiful. It’s just sort of amazing how this idea helps to at one time anchor the shot and anchor some energy of it also it’s one of the main things that’s creating a very powerful sense of unity among all the subjects. The other thing that I would mention here is this really beautiful feeling of sort of soft light, pastel light. As far as digital cameras have in common, they are sort of amazing now to say the least; the town curve of the sensor has not really improved much at all and that must be something that’s very difficult to do otherwise, it would have changed already and what I mean by that is digital capture still has a real hard time with the brightest points in the scene but digital capture goes as a lot more shutter detail than what we use to get on our average shooting slide film. So, when we shoot, the Eastern sunset or the Western sunrise shooting away from the light source, started shooting into the Eastern sunrise and into the Western sunset. We can make our life a lot easier, we get away from things like Split Inter-density Filters, user dynamic range is too big, we get away from having a bracket exposures and so a lot of work in Photoshop. And it’s just something to think about with the digital camera started fighting this fact that the highlights blow out, I started to change the way that I shot and I do shoot a lot more in my landscapes in these directions and it’s just another great thing to think about as a photographer—to always try and be together enough technically and aware enough to be really cool that you shoot some good shots. Whatever you set up to shoot in this direction what about a sketch shot in this direction, this direction, this direction just to start to teach yourself more about quality of light; how the camera sees it so on and so forth.
So I wanted to mention that I think about this image in any kind of variation that I might like better. The one thing that I think about is this texture in the middle ground gets pretty powerful and one of the ways that we could have cut down on that is to get this exposure in sight, Yeah, really love the breaking wave here and that’s what I want but let me shoot a few more exposures on this scene and slow the shutter down even more. One of the things I do love about carrying my 4X6 scene raise split inter density filters so they are longer than the ones that fit the P-Series in is that they are so long that the top part of the filter where it’s dark can act as neutral density. It doubles its splitter neutral and neutral density. This will cover even my widest angle review on my lands. And let’s have a 3 or 4 stops split inter-density filters and I can carry those than I could have taken a quarter of a second, slowed it down to a half, a second, 2 seconds, 3 seconds, 4 seconds. That might have been enough. It could have also started on the actual 22 because on that shot I could care less about the fraction. I’m trying to essentially make things softer and make the detail go away. I could have got easily to 8 seconds or 15 seconds, I could have blended that exposure with this exposure. Here’s a gross estimate of what I’m talking about. I could just say softening sort of everything and trying to play kind of the torment texture of the edge of the cloud of on the bottom part and making the middle ground something that’s more subtle and we’d love to hear what you have to think about that. I wish that I’ve done a little bit better job of this in Photoshop because it would look a lot nicer and carry with it and loses much just local contrast and just get rid of some of some of the texture. I think this would make a really beautiful black and white conversion. There is just one idea and here is something else I wanted to mention today. I want to make this smaller and whenever I work on them it just 5.33 landscape images. Constantly thinking about the idea of re-proportion and re-scaling.
This is a shot where I think the more panoramic that I want with this maybe the better it would look. The longer I make these lines, there’s such a beautiful part of the image. The further I have to go to get to this is sort of the anchoring; tie it all together element that I might slow my eye down even more and I might like it even more and this is what I’m talking about. We could just go here and just go to image size and uncheck the constraint proportion, so just uncheck this. It’s typically tat the default is checked so just uncheck it and just make the image wider than it is long and we could just experiment with this. I’m going to go 16 inches and hit OK and there is nothing about this that seems wacky even the rock. If I start to go to much further than this the rock might start to seem whack so what I could start to do is make selections like this on the edge and not include the rock and pull those edges out even a little bit more and get to a something like a 2 to 1 panoramic. This is before. Let me go all the way back to this. This is before and this is after. Let me drop that selection. Would love to hear your feedback on what you think about that idea. Like I’ve said I think that we could continue to go even further and this is just something I’d really encourage you to think about, the idea of rescaling and changing image proportions. With a strong digital file to start of with we can really rest things up 300, 500, 700 percent a lot of times without any perceived loss of quality and to me this is work that is so easy and so fast to do and it’s something that can really change the way we look at part of an image or an overall image and I’m just constantly reminding myself that I have that as a creative tool that’s available to me after the fact. Love, love, love the shots, beautiful image. Let me get back to Jose’s original shot here and just want to say a very big thank you to Jose for sharing this for the Mindful Eye’s Daily Critique.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services