We’ve reached the last challenge of this semester. It’s kind of hard to believe, mainly because I’ve been so focused on other things that time just crawled away from me. Like, I blinked, only to discover that time passed. Insane!
That left me with a unique issue; what do I do for my final challenge? I’ve wrestled with a few ideas (doing a photo series, astrophotography, snow photos) but nothing really stuck with me. Somewhere, I heard a friend say “take a blind leap of faith”. Suddenly, I was inspired!
But how was I inspired from a phrase that somewhat contradicts itself?
I’ll tell ya. It’s my task to randomly find myself in a random setting (on campus), and I have to situate myself in one spot, also somewhat randomly. Once I choose a spot, I’m stuck there for the remainder of the shoot. The goal is to walk away with a unique, interesting photograph.
The random location I found myself at was the Arboretum. At the time of the photos, there was a freezing rain that covered literally everything. It crystalized things, and it created a new atmosphere.
This photo (shown above) was my choice from the photo walk. The ice completely coated everything, including this bush thing. So, I grabbed my wide angle lens (10-18mm). Pay attention to how everything warps around the sides, and how the bush looks bigger in the center? That’s what the wide angle camera does. It expands the visibility of the scene, capturing more of the subject within the image. I also attempted to do something called macro photography, where I try to take pictures of smaller things by getting unusually close to it. Of course, I really didn’t like how this original image looked, so I threw it into Photoshop to add a bit of character beyond being an ice-covered dead bush.
in Photoshop: I adjusted the brightness and shadows, making the shadows more pronounced while also taking the bright whites down a little.
in Photoshop: I added a green shade to the shadows, and added a slight blue to the highlights. This adds a bit more of a colorgrade to the overall image.
And that concludes my blog. Hopefully you learned a thing or two about photography, or maybe felt inspired to see the world through another lens.
There’s a lot to be said about color. Colors can change one’s mood depending on the hue and saturation, or simply change the way you look at something to begin with. I honestly prefer the black-and-white aesthetics over colors, mostly because colors can be incredibly difficult to edit. If you take a photograph, for example, and you find that something’s not in the right shade, you can spend hours trying to correct the unusual color. Likewise, you could also spend hours fixing the color, only to discover that it has ruined the image.
Don’t get me wrong; you cannot salvage a photo with bad colors by turning it black and white. But you can’t rely on the original image for color either. There’s simply a lot that goes into a colored image that can make things difficult even for those who are experienced.
For this challenge, I will take a photograph with color, and I have to adjust the colors in some major way.
I personally try my best to stay away from colored images, like previously mentioned. If I absolutely can’t avoid color, then I either desaturate the colors (make them duller) or only make minor changes with the lightness of the colors (brighten or darken the image to change how bright the colors appear).
I was given the opportunity to photograph someone on a really crappy day, which was the perfect scenario for this challenge. Rainy conditions left everything darker than usual (due to saturation), along with the cloudy skies caused a complete imbalance of colors. The model, in this case my best friend’s little brother, had on clothing that didn’t really help with the imbalance.
before image: the original photograph from camera.
in Camera Raw: made subtle adjustments to the overall exposure, highlights, and shadows of the image.
in Photoshop: lightened up the entire image, then used additional highlights and shadows to correct some imbalance.
in Photoshop: a color gradient was added to not only tone the reds down, but create a bit of a faux-golden hour look.
The first photo, as you can see, is the before image. Notice how unusually bright the red flannel looks against everything else. My main goal is to correct that without looking too unnatural. I began to make those adjustments in Camera Raw, but it pronounced his face and cheeks too much (in an unnatural manor). I then proceed to edit within Photoshop to try and correct the cheeks. I did this by messing with the highlights and shadows. I made fake shadows and fake highlights by over-exposing and under-exposing the image purposefully, then turning that into a mask, which only showed the change in exposure only wherever I wanted it to.
The color gradient is a relatively more recent tool I’ve discovered on Photoshop. It essentially allows the editor to adjust the image’s color by overlaying a gradient to the image. The darker color on the gradient shows up within the shadows, and the brighter color shows up within the highlights.
The photo above is with the color gradient applied, without adjustments. It looks like a VSCO filter gone wrong, I know, but stick with me here. The gradient gives an overall brownish/orange-ish color to the photo, which was meant to bring out the orange/yellow colors while covering the rest up. If we go back to the final image, you can see that the red in the model’s face better matches with his skin. The yellows and oranges that were brought out was from the little amounts of sunlight that peaked through the clouds. The orange-ish effect is commonly known as golden hour, which the setting sun releases a golden-colored light everywhere. The gradient helped recreate the golden hour look.To incorporate the color gradient, I changed the opacity of the gradient.
I believe I properly fixed the look of a certain color without giving the appearance of an over-saturated, over-edited image. Therefore, I classify this challenge a success.
