The Mindful Eye: Daily Critique

Essentially, The Mindful Eye is a revamped and refocused version of an old site called The Radiant Vista. It has a variety of interesting instructional content from a few differnt contributors and an impressive user community, but for me the best part about the site is the video daily critiques.

I've been following Craig Tanner since I went to a Rocky Mountain School of Photography weekend workshop (Craig no longer works with the school), and I think that The Mindful Eye Web site is probably the best place on the Web to find detailed, respectfully done, instructional critiques.

The critiques are not quite daily any more (if they ever were), but they are published frequently enough to keep me tuning in. There is a smattering of Eckart Tolle-inspired wisdom and philosophy of photography mixed in with some thoughts about gear and also some revelatory ideas about how the concept of Talent is mainly a myth.

Most of all, this section of The Mindful Eye Web site zooms in on an image and focuses with razor sharp precision on what's great about the image and what might be improved. The best lesson I've learned from the daily critique is how to critique in a way that empowers the photographer to take their work to the next level, rather than cutting them down.

I've also learned a lot from Craig's views on improvements. A typical critique talks about the all various considerations when capturing the image and also the image editing process. Usually, examples of post work improvements are made to the image by Criag and shown as examples during the course of the video critique -- along with the specifics on how the changes are made in Photoshop.

http://www.tmelive.com/index.php/articles/3.html