My plan: For this project I felt like it was the perfect time of year to take photos of the fallen leaves which are starting to get to their crumbling stage.
My New Photos:
For this shoot, I took pictures of leaves that have fallen off the trees on to the ground, around the school and around town. In four of the photos I actually crumbled the leaves in my hand and set them in a certain spot and captured a picture before the wind blew them away. I wanted the photos to be like messy and look dull. One of the photos contains a leaf which is in the shape of a heart and has a tear in it. I found the leaf like that and knew I could do something cool with it to really show my idea of decay, not just physically but also in a universal way depending on how you look at it.
My Edits:
For my edits I prefer to use photoshop. For all of these images I tried to create a lot of value and contrast in order to make certain parts of the images stand out. Once again , I decided to do my edits in black and white and adjust the exposure a lot to create the film look. When editing I try to also focus on texture and I think texture was especially important in this project in order to see the veins on the leaves and the crumbling effect. I am proud that in all of these photos they all have a different mood and elements to make them able to stand individually or together.
My Printed/Matted Piece:
This is my final product. It is a digital photo of me holding a ripped, heart shaped leaf in my left hand. The leaf is in the slight right/middle of the photo, my thumb is directly in the middle holding the leaf where the rip behind on the bottom, covering two of my fingers, and my ring finger is on the close right of the leaf. In the background the sun casted shadows of the trees that were above me on to the wood chips and the entire background is blurry. When editing I wanted to focus mainly on how I can make this image more symbolic than just a dying leaf. I started by putting the photo in black and white and adjusting to show a lot of values throughout the photo. I used photoshop and removed the stem of the leaf to contribute to my idea for this photo. My intentions for this photo was not only to show physical decay but also a mental or symbolic decay which is represented by the leaf which naturally occurred in the shape of a broken heart. Making the heart really dark I think supported and defined my idea for this photo. It also creates a point of interest in the photo. For the background of this photo I think the shadows just mainly contributed to the values in this photo and uses the values to compliment the main subject. When interpreting this photo, there’s this idea that just like the ripped leaf can’t be put back together or will never be the same as before, when we as people are broken and hurt we never completely heal, and we don’t forget the events that broke us, they stick with us forever.