Everybody this is Craig Tanner for The Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. Today’s image was submitted by Matthias who is an advance photographer from Germany, Matthias says, “I guess it’s a classic that almost every photographer goes through to about a flower and I put a drop of water on it. Matthias says that the light here coming from a window. So this is a natural light, window light. Shot this with Canon ES300D and set to 105-macro lens and set around to F56, exposed the file for a sixth of second on Auto White Balance and shot this from the tripod.
One thing I mentioned right at front if you’re—particularly if you’re just getting into photography about the technical part of the discussion today is the lens. This is such a great lens for so many different reasons. I mean it’s great to have a macro lens like this with this kind of focal length because you did work in distance from your subject; lets you focus very close. It let you get great magnification typically one to one or somewhere close to one to one which means you can focus on things that are very small and it’s a great portrait lens. I have a canon 100mm macro, that’s one of my favorite lenses that always have with me. I can shift macro; I can also do great portrait work with it. Another thing I mention is that Sigma and Tameron make great versions of these lenses.
That’s what Matthias is shooting with here, the sigma version of this lens and they could save you some money over an icon and canon. Let’s get into the image, which are gorgeous, stunning colors here. Real classic, color pair from the printer’s color wheeled happening in a very-very vibrant way, green and magenta; kind of need how that place out into some oranges and green, place of each other very well. And the other thing that’s fine is that colors like red and pink and magenta, they’re so virtually powerful that they can also play very very beautifully to an images that have a real dominant feeling of what say a hot pink or hot magenta or primary red to have black and to have white. Both of those are very-very powerful color ideas and they play well with the real dominant colors on the color wheel. So really stunning from a color standpoint, stunning from a quality of light stand points.
So many macro shots do very-very well to have sort of a soft broad light source which one do like candy. And I’m loving the feeling and a sort of luminous light coming from the window here. The other thing I love about the light here is the secular’s highlights that it’s creating on the main subject, the bubble or the water droplet. These shapes are doing a beautiful job of rhyming that overall feeling of design that we’re getting from the flower. And that’s really stunning, a little stunning bit of unity there in the image, great job of managing focus here. That can be tough shooting macro can be very tedious, Matheas has done a beautiful job of leaving his main subject very sharp, and then everything else pulls off. That helps to really simplify this image and I think overall, a beautiful composition. I like the way that both of the diagonals—I have a feeling that being used here and kind of cross-hatching as far as movement need how the feeling of one side of the flower breaks things up.
One thing if you just get into photography, then look out here there’s a very powerful idea. Just photographing a part of something and can be tempting of particularly when we’re starting out to come fascinated with objects and then just kind of to show the whole object in coming and showing a part of the object and letting the viewer make up a story about the rest of it. Is it more of cinematic kind of approach to photography and it can be very powerful? I think about perfect world improvement for this one, I’d like to create a variation--when I say variation because I love just the way it is.
I’d like to look at a variation where we could sort deal with two things. This is only thing that sharpen in the plain of focus next back in here under the water droplet and you get some sharpness. Almost perfect sharpness on this little petal but it’s just straight across right in the middle of the image and if you’re open to changing that to editorial content of the image. I might come in and give this just a little bit of movement like this. To kind of rhyme or mimic all of these other kind of dolphin shaped petals of the flower and it might just soften that a little bit and give a little bit of curve. The other that’s happening for me is this becomes pretty dominating as high contrast. It almost looks like another little flower out of focus maybe or maybe; it’s just the secular highlight. But it gets on par with the main subject and starts to create a little bit of a feeling for me like things are getting static and pretty easy in this one to come in.
Again, if you’re open to change to editor of content like a raw selection like this, which is what I did and then scale it out and pull this thing out over here and pull this light part into the corner. Create a little bit of the feeling if this arching around like that and play off of the diagonal. And a big part of the reason that I want to do that is that this is the main subject and with starting to get on par with it for me, it starts to compete with that a little bit and I feel like if this was over here that it could compliment it on the diagonal. And so here we go; copy the background as a matter you’ve have it and here is the layer where I just selected that real straight edge. And in this case, I used—add a transform warp and then I painted away the rest of my selection. Here’s what those selection looks like and here’s what it look like before the mask.
You can see I have to work the absolute heck out of it to get that line at the top to move. And here’s the layer where came at the bottom and rescaled so we can turn this eyeballs off and look at what that looks like before and after the mask. Just a big rough selection there and I just scaled it out to the right. Look at again in the context of the shot, there’s before, there’s after, then I came in, and I just did a couple of thing. I’ve set a true black point using curves and the black point eyedropper and curves I did that up here in the image, I came in, and I set a true white point and low belt. Locally here as where we started and here is where we ended up. Now, this brings up something interesting which is once I did all this work. I thought maybe I like Mathias better and you might think, well, who cares, this is really not what the daily critique is supposed to be about and you’re about absolutely right. So why am I mentioning it?
I’m mentioning it to give you another couple of take away. Hopefully from todays critique which is the idea of that element of time and your editing process. And to me, there’s a lot of different ways to think about it bit too very basic ways to think about this first. The amount of time you’re allow to happen from the point that which you make pictures to when you start to actually try to choose your top selects and maybe do an initial first to add it. We can get so caught up in the reality of your experience and it can be so hard to let go of some things about that. For instance, if we to work really hard to get a certain picture, we might start to have a big emotional attachment to that image and no one else have any concept that we’ve marched 52 miles through this nowhere or whatever to get there. The other element of time to me is allowing time in your process to let’s say pick your top selects and work on an image and have our first pass at it. And then let that sit for another day or two or maybe even three.
What I find so much at the time is that I’m pretty good at picking my top selects even if it’s very soon after a shoot. I’ve been doing this long enough to where I feel like I’ve done a pretty good job and being able to let go stuffs that happened while we’re shooting and quite thinking what’s outside and what I’m just seeing on my virtual light box. But I still find that if I had an images and then print that or give them to somebody and I don’t let the editing just stay for a little while and then come back and have a second look at that. A lot of times I have quite a little bit regret; so just wanted to mention that in the context of Mathias beautiful image before I do anything to it. It’s a real stunner from a color standpoint; great macro shot. I want to say a big thank you to Mathias for sharing this image with us on The Mindful Eye’s daily critique.
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