Hands

Anna Labbe

From the Deep

February 4, 2019

For this project, the goal was to come up with our first photography of Photography II, following the prompt of hands. In addition, if we wanted, we could also begin our concentration with this photo. For my concentration, I decided on the theme of water/liquids (I'm thinking I'm just going to stick strictly with water). So for my picture I was looking to incorporate both hands and water in one image.

At first I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do for this image. I was imagining different ways to incorporate water other than just having some hands cupping water. I wanted something a little more intriguing than that, so I started thinking of steam. One idea that I thought of was having a fogged up window or mirror and a handprint placed on it, so that the only see-through part of the mirror was a dripping hand print. However, this didn't really work out, and it was time to come up with a plan B. Another plan of mine was to have a hand/person kind of emerging from the water, but I wasn't really sure how to do this. My mom wouldn't let me put food coloring or paint in her sink to color the water, so I had to come up with a different solution. I found online that adding a little bit of milk to water can create a really cool effect, and also got rid of the weird pattern that was visible in my sink. I then asked my mom if I could use her as a hand model (because I couldn't take the picture and have my hand in the water milk at the same time).

I found that I liked the pictures a lot better when I took them in the pitch black, with the flash of the camera on, because it added more interesting highlights. After I took a bunch of pictures I decided on this one, because it look's like my mom's hand is emerging from the water milk, and is kind of creepy! I then decided to change the image to black and white, because I thought it looked more visually interesting and had a pretty good range of value.