Hey everybody! This is Craig Tanner for the Mindful Eye and the Daily critique. Today’s image was submitted by a Chauzen, a Media Photographer from Indiana. Chau took trip to visit his father and photograph this little boy on the trip. This is the son of woman that works with his dad and he said that the boy was very tentative in the process of creating this image. At the beginning of the process and Chau, kept working was able to come in close and made this portrait. He said the eyes are very important to him; he did some Photoshop work where I brought the face up some more. I don’t know the camera body here but Chau used a Nikon 50mm, F18 lens stopped down to F56 and exposed the file from 180th of a second. Now, if the eyes are the main the subject here then Chau has hit a home run.
The boy has a beautiful face and beautiful eyes which going to create a subject to work with if we’re trying to show eyes but there are a lot other things to me that are really working in terms of making the eyes have very powerful part of this photograph. One is quality of light. When you have a great quality of light in the eyes, you get this feeling of sparkling, very luminous quality of light. This almost looks like big room with as bunch of windows and he’s got kind of an overall feeling of gorgeous catch light on the top half of the eyes. But it’s sort of made up of multiple catch lights and that creates this very sort of luminous kind of sparkling feeling very-very powerful for us is the viewer to see that and the same quality of light is creating such a great feeling of form on the boy’s face. You’ve got this really beautiful secular highlight here. Almost would like a really beautifully done kicker light effect right there on the top of the head. Really beautiful accent light effect here and then a nice flow of light from high to low that’s creating some really beautiful. That subtle drop shadows is creating a lot of form and helping the lower mask of the face to separate; stunning quality of light.
The other thing I’m enjoying here is in terms of the eyes being very visually powerful, here is the gesture. Even the child’s done a great job here sort in getting pass the initial resistance so he can take the picture of the little boy is still resisting there. So you can tell from the body language. The head is straight up and down, the eyes are looking straight out, and that’s a bit of body language that we used when we’re still in the sort of being threatened there by space. It’s a little better maybe a lot of confrontational just depending on the situation. And so that makes this very palpable for us is the viewer in terms of the expression and gesture itself are carrying a lot of power at the level of the eyes.
I’ll just go ahead and say right now that one of the other things that makes this expression so that on the level for staring as down very powerful is the other focus adult here. So it’s easy to imagine, this is mom after hearing the back-story but she’s smiling. He get that right away in the eyes and in the mouth and so this adds another level of emotional depth to the image sort of confrontational maybe tentative or not comfortable and then happy child, adult sort of looking over the shoulder or maybe here taker kind of feeling. That’s very powerful to way the depth the field has been managed here, very powerful. The combination of the child being very close here and they fill the frame with the face, with the 50mm lens, you’re going to have to be super close.
When you combine that with the Aperture of F56, you’ll have a lot of depth the field right here at the level of the face where everything on the face is sharp but then a nice follow up of focus.
To the background is helping to simplify pre-complicated background. That’s why I start to think about perfect world improvement for this image. The background even though I love this from the history-telling standpoint is a little bit out of balance with the main subject. Why do I say that? For two reasons; when I looked at the main subject from the shape stand point of—I’m starting to think about unity based on rhythm, you just get hit over the head with the idea of circle has a visual design element. And it plays out and a lot of other places are in half circles but because of the people and the auras of the eye, you’d just get this real strong sense of circle that sets up. You have two more circles on the background. They’re super high contrast. Almost as high contrast is the eyes right here and right here. But then they don’t finish and they’re imperfect. You’ve got this sort of tipsy-doodle here that really starts to for me create a little bit of destruction. You have a circle that’s almost perfect in the starts and then it gets chopped off and get some tangent with the face.
And I’d like to round those things off they you were open to change in the editorial content of the image and also create a little bit more balance coming in here and having some dark value that pushes in. The same thing over here put a little bit more of a frame this balance from left to right here and then just creating more balance at the level of rhythm with these ideas in the image. And so here’s a layer where I did all that we’re cloning and I did that work pretty rough. You can tell but I also knew that I was going to come in and add a lens blur so that I didn’t have to do that work in the background perfect.
That’s what’s so nice about starting off in the first place with the flow of focus. It’s much easier on a shot like this it to blur the background. If it’s already blur to begin with, it’s easy to sort of lean on it. Very difficult if everything’s sharp just start to trying to create a realistic kind of lens blurs effect from a retouching standpoint. There’s the clowning, there’s the burring and then coming in just creating a curves layer, you could done this a lot of different ways to come in and darken the shirt, darken the frame and darken some other areas to really trying to make the eyes, the highest contrast thing that really comes forward. The shirt is packing a lot of visual light right now and so as this part of the image. So here’s that curves layer where I did that work. I think you could take it even further than that.
Here’s where we started, here’s where we ended up. Couple of other things I’ll mention here at the end, one is I definitely can see a variation if you were to shoot and then stop and look for a second. Turn the boy opposite right. What do I mean by that? This shoulder back here is forward, he’s actually turned to three quarters in this way where the ears is over here. A way the ear doesn’t get up on the face here and the ear can actually do a nice job of balancing on the diagonal. Her face, his face and then his ear and he’s looking this way. I’m not saying that will work, this is just something that I think about when I looked at this and something else that I think about will really change the way we managed this in Photoshop but what I would call him unconventional crop, more of the cinematic crop where you come in and you do something like this.
Then, I would want to get rid of the circle right here and just darken the whole corner down right here. And I might even want to come in on the crap here. It’s so tempting to get the top of the room and a lot of times getting on the top of room makes your life a lot more complicated. And a lot of times it’s just more powerful for the viewer to feel in the gap, to get rid of things that are not about your main subject, you can trust the viewer to fill this information in. and because they’re feeling in their mind, that’s not something for a visual design point that you have to deal with. Having said all that, it’s a stunning portrait without doing one thing to it. I want to say huge Thank you to Chau for submitting the image. Big apology to you Chau, I probably mangled the pronunciation of your name. I googled it and I tried to find the pronunciation online because I don’t--people’s names are--to me. It’s almost like a sacred kind of thing. And I’m so sorry if I did that. I did the best that I could. Thanks a lot for submitting the image, beautiful image, hope to see you again real soon on the Mindful eye’s daily critique.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services