Silhouette

The subject of the photo, Digital Eclipse, is my hand, and the background/setting of it is one of the large ceiling lights that are found in the hallways of the high school. This photo was made by pointing my camera up at on of the lights, then positioning my hand in front of it, to create this silhouette. After I took the photo, I put it into Photoshop and adjusted all the values, making sure it was a pure silhouette and changing the saturation to give it the yellow-ish color it has. I chose to create this specific photo because I was in the hallway looking for light sources, and I noticed that the lights were slightly out of ordinary and thought they would make and interesting image. The elements and principles of design that I used in this photo are color, space, and contrast. This photo is composed unevenly, with most of the weight being put to one side by my hand.

The composition rules and techniques I used in this photo are rule of thirds since a third of the photo is taken up by the hand, informal balance since the hand throws off where the viewers eyes focus to (not bringing them to the center of the photo), silhouette lighting since the photo captures a silhouette of my hand, framing since the boundary of the light frames the photo, and low key lighting since overall the exposure on the image is fairly low. My project evolved because when I first took the photo it wasn't necessarily a perfect silhouette, so I changed the values and changed the color of the light slightly to give the photo a warmer feel.

The story behind this image is I thought the yellow light looked like the sun, and my hand would be the moon causing a solar eclipse; however, since the moon is replaced by my hand, with five digits, and since it is a digital photo, I named it Digital Eclipse. This photo relates to my life because every single night the moon shines right through my window, keeping me awake (which is very annoying), so if an eclipse of any kind occurred I would be very thankful because I could finally get some rest. If my image could be stronger, I think I would have done something more interesting with my hand because although it looks kind of cool how it is... there are definitely some better options for this.