Geometric Shadows

Artist Statement

For this image, it was difficult for me to find how to cast the shadows—I struggled with how much light should be in the background, which object would cast the most obvious shadow, and where the object should be placed. I moved things around a lot and wasn't sure what my subject should be until I noticed a book of mine sitting on my nightstand. Overall, the creation of this image had a lot of trial and error. In the end, my subject was an open book, with lines of shadow cast over it (by a chair from my dining room). I also struggled with cropping the image; the shadow only stretched so far and my photo editing skills still need some work. I tried to preserve the composition of the image along with showing as much of the book and other space as possible.

I took many photos before choosing the image to edit—I tried to test out different angles of the book from different perspectives. I settled on placing the book diagonally and leaving some space on the side to show the geometric shadows both on and off the book. I also changed which book I used halfway through (the larger book, which you see here, simply looked better and allowed more shadows to fit on it). With my photo editing, I edited out some light that crept into the edge of the very top of the original image. I also played around with emphasizing the shadows a bit while still maintaining not too much contrast to the point where the words of the book become too blurry or too sharp. As for the original concept, I was not planning on this final image at all—I had to improvise when none of my sketched-out concepts worked out in reality with the materials and time I had.

This image, for me, conveys the beauty of literature and language. However, I feel as if I could have made that clearer with further photo editing—the image has decent composition, but I would like to play around with saturation, color/tint, and more that can make it stand out and be more eye-catching. A book is usually a more boring subject, depending on your amount of love for reading or how interesting an open book really seems in everyday life, so I would like to improve upon making the image more bold. As for the geometric shadows themselves and how they are placed, I'm quite happy with the result, and believe I used those as well as I could with the image above. They certainly help make the image more interesting, as opposed to just a large book sitting on a floor.