Hi everybody, this is Craig Tanner for The Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. Today’s image who submitted by Clive who is advance photographer from the UK, Clive said he was part of a group photo shoot from an online community. And this is Bill who came all the way from Ohio in the United States to be a part of this group shooting. He said, “After shooting some other things I sat down to have dinner” and Clive had the opportunity to try a Lensbaby Composer on his 5D and he took the shot of Bill. So she took several shuts and this is was his favorite, so this was shut on the Canon 5D full frame since with camera Lensbaby Composer at F2 that’s wide open on that lens.
And at ISO 800, it exposed the file for an 80th of a second. Really neat the portrait and just real quick about the Lensbaby this is one of the cool things about the Lensbaby. You are in this situation where you're having diner it looks like it outside and there’s a lot going on in the background and that the Lensbaby is special to lens and that’s a selective focus lens. So you have a 50 millimeter lens here that without any aperture rings is a real sort of funky system of setting your aperture with is the rings that sit on top of the front element and magnets hold those aperture rings on the front element. That any other rings the Lensbaby Composer is an F2 lens.
So we’re getting shallow depth of field here because the cloud is pretty close to the subject and he is shooting wide open on the fast lens. But in addition to that the Lensbaby’s the fun element is worked and there's just a sweet spot to focus in the middle and that gets very distorted in additional to the shallow depth of field here on the edges. And you seen that distortion you can see it in the elliptical bulkhead. The reason this bulkhead is elliptical and seems to point towards the middle of frame is because of that warping of the lens.
I love the Lensbaby frame pop to portraits and so much of my street photography is either done with the Lensbaby or I try to use the Lensbaby. And tomorrow I'm going to get in to that a little bit. I talked about doing another self critique or I talked about doing another self critique where I talk a little bit about approach and I'm going to do that tomorrow. So we’ll continue with this idea of portraits and then for those of you that love landscapes, so I go ahead and tell you now the photo of the week on Friday is an absolutely just draw dropping and mind stopping a landscape image that we’ll be looking at.
One of the things that are interesting to me about this image is just some of this overall sort of shapes in the background. There's a little bit of a feeling of formal symmetry with these squares and Bill is very squared up so his torso is sort of making this square shape. And you do have the sort of design that sets up that’s real—it’s broken up above the distortion of the Lensbaby with sort of real graphic and I've outlined it here.
You know and one of the things that I've been talking about when we’re looking at composition is sort of doing this trying to look at the image in different ways and one of the ways to look at this in sort of a bare bounce kind of structure kind of a way. And so it’s really interesting even with all these stuff going on I like the way this has been framed based on the shapes with Bill just sitting here looking straight out and showing up in the image on a very much of a formally symmetrical kind of a way. I think that works well.
I'm going to talk just a minute about possibly changing the color around. Colors definitely very exciting here, one of the interesting thing about colors there's a lot of colors happening back here in the background. And Bill is obviously wearing some kind of very colorful shirt maybe looks like a rock group of something here I don’t know. And these colors are playing up with each other in a way that’s very, very interesting. And the fact that Bill isn't quite looking at the camera here, that can be really powerful.
Cinema has sort of trained us to feel a certain way about this kind of an image where the portrait subject is seemingly not aware of the camera. And that has a different psychological impact on us. One of the things I'm always trying to do when I'm shooting portrait is to get variations where the person is looking into the camera and looking away from the camera just one type of variation.
The other thing that I want to say is that Lensbaby there's a learning curve with it and when you shoot it wide open like Clive is here, when you combine that small suites by the focus have very, very shallow depth to field it can get pretty difficult when you just starting to use it to get thing sharp and so one of the things that I would say that Clive has done a beautiful job up here is getting sharpness right here in the face and his composes in the way or it’s making it easier for him to do that. He’s pulled back a little bit.
You didn’t have a smallest sweets spot of focus you can imagine if he comes in and tries to do a really tight portrait of Bill’s head the sweetest spot of focus more and be able to cover both of his eyes with no aperture ring in there. When I shoot with the Lensbaby, most of the time I shoot with the F4 aperture ring on a full sense of camera on a craft factor camera like my 50D I would use the F28 aperture ring. But a lot of my Lensbaby shuts I will get back a little bit and I will create a composition where the persons face can fit within that sweet spot of focus, it’s just something to think about.
I think we are perfect well improvement for this image. Again, I really think about the idea of hands and I just want kind of keep driving this point home, you know, it will be really cool if Bill could have brought his hands together here and raised them up and his making some kind of gesture down here and there's negative space that comes around that. And you know maybe we pull back even a little bit more or pan down a little bit.
The thing about that is that it would sort of complete a circle down here and it would create another layer of the story. Right now there’s sort of two layers. There's Bill and then there's the background information and that can be a little bit static for trying to create the film and moving through the image. And just like will of third says that three things would typically more dynamic than two because you can divide those in half.
Same thing is true when we’re layering pictures and I will think about that and I do really think that a lot of times about near, middle and far even in my people photography I always think that like a landscape photographer that something I could frame this with that will give the suggestion of something near than the person and then the background and play that for field in a way where it soft, short and then soft again. And we could have that here with the hand just suggesting the hands—something is happening here with the short sleeves shirt to these highlights of just the arms are a little bit distracting for me in the bottom of the frame. If you look at the bottom balance with the top balance these ideas are not going very well with the sort of simple and at the top of the frame and something to think about.
Something I will also says real quick is the technique that I use with the Lensbaby. Let’s say that I was going to have the hand through and I didn’t want them to be totally distorted and totally locked out. I will shoot one quick frame or I bent the lens down and focus closer to the hands and once I have that then I would keep shooting Bill’s face and I could blend those. One of the really cool things about the Lensbaby and we’re going to look at those tomorrow in myself critique is that because you have this distortion that becomes easy to do this split focus composites. So it’s becomes easier to do them relative to shooting with the normal lens.
One of the first things I would do to this is I crop it and that would be my crop. And one of the next things that t I would do is I will remove this that sort of blocking the energy up here and it’s coming out of Bill’s head and so I did that. And then one thing that I think quite a bit about is trying to frame my subjects in a way where they can be contained and the eye will slow down a little bit more. One of the things that happening for me here is I zoom past Bill because there in not a too great of frame right now around his face to stop me for zooming past and where it really now I'm talking about pose production kind of work for digital background kind of work.
So here's what I'm talking about. This going to come in is definitely getting a very different feel to Bill and so that might not work. But if I'm just thinking about slowing the eye down, creating a framing not only around him but out here around the edge of the frame starts to create more of a feeling of this is the subject and then this is the subject so on and so forth.
Something else should I say here is this is something another area that I might consider cloning out there's kind of blocking energy in the same way this was up here a little bit more complicated to do that and I didn’t take the time to do it. This going to comeback to really where were yesterday so two portraits are real similar even though the colors here sort of exciting and everything and you get this many different colors, you're bound the house some color clashing. And you're getting that in here sort of pink and orange can really clasher with each other even have the sure but then it repeats back in the background and I just start to get overwhelmed.
If I think about this image in black and white I see, you know, I figure get rid of all the color the shapes so the face is here on the t-shirt and the bulkhead right here those things are ramming really well if we take the over lay up color away. And to me this just works so much better in black and white. You know, black and white is just easier that color by magnitude or that I even know what, I mean I would much rather shoot him black and white all the time because color is so damn complicated and it’s one of the most difficult things to get your mind around to me in the visual arts.
And situations like this where I have all that color back there, you know, on the perfect world what I would think is god I wish I have a selection of t-shirts. And there's a way to pick a color here long sleeves shirt that would harmonize or compliment one of these domain ideas in the background but there's so many different colors back here that that might not even work here and it might sort of those I'm thinking about color be looking for a different background. And so much of the time when I'm thinking color and I'm shooting straight portraits I'll have background sort of in an area where I try to walk somebody over two and I'm already thinking about harmony and compliment are color but mainly what I'm thinking about is how can I cut down on the number of colors and I do end up like in this black and white. I mean there's I think the green channel I think there's the blue channel, they're both pretty interesting and there all kinds of other ways to convert this.
Great, great job here by Clive just using Lensbaby for the first time. It’s really a great portrait of his friend Bill and I want to say thank you to you for being here on to my plus data critique.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services