Landscape

Artist Statement

To capture the unedited image I knew I wanted to wander out into the woods in my backyard. There is a stream there that my sister and I visit often in the summer, so I hoped I could take some photos there. It was a bit rainy before I went outside to go take some photos, so the path through the woods was a little slippery. I went along the edge of the water to take photos, trying to play around with elements of the composition like the horizon, the rule of thirds, and formal or informal balance. The setting wasn’t ideal due to the weather and the seasons transitioning out of winter into spring (it would have been a little better in the summer), so I tried from a variety of angles and places in the woods. I settled on this image because the composition clearly included the water, the trees on the left side of the image, as well as the trees further in the distance.

For photo edits, I had a few different directions I could potentially try—the first would be to make the image black and white and increase the contrast to make it more interesting, but I worried that those edits wouldn’t work in the setting the photo was taken because the grey in the background would become fuzzy and the clarity of the image would be reduced. I chose instead to emphasize the atmosphere of the image, portraying a rainy day. I added the ocean ripple and grain filters to the background layer, changing the setting of the grain filter to vertical and reducing its intensity and contrast. Next, I wanted to overlay a faint gradient on the image to change the colors a little bit and act as a bit of a filter—I chose to do this by doing a blue gradient, but changing the layer blend setting to luminosity. I attempted to add a rain effect by creating another layer and adding small, thin lines with the brush tool and changing the opacity of the layer to 50%, then changing the layer blend setting to overlay. This didn’t work as well as I had hoped, but I reduced the layer opacity some more and left it there to blend partially with the grain filter. Last, I added another gradient from white to transparent on another layer so that it looked like there was a little more light entering from the top of the image. I reduced the layer opacity and changed its layer blend setting to soft light. Finally, I transported the jpeg into Photos and made some minor adjustments there. I strengthened the shadows slightly, reduced the black point setting, and increased the brilliance a little. Most notably, however, I increased the saturation. After doing so, I used the select color feature to increase the saturation of green and yellow further changing the hue to the yellow in the image to look more green. I hoped this would make up for the lack of color in the original image (there was a lot of brown because of the dead leaves everywhere and it was a dull, rainy day, so I wanted to make sure the green stood out).

Originally, I wanted the image to include formal balance to emphasize the rhetorical device of parallelism, but I decided against it when informal balance proved to be more interesting in the setting composition-wise (and easier to include). Therefore, I thought that it would connect to my personal concentration of portraying literary devices in photography better through imagery. Imagery is used in writing to convey something by referencing one or multiple of your five senses. Photography can connect to this quite well visually—by eliminating the need for the description of what the person sees—but I wanted to try to use photo editing to emphasize the mood of the setting as well, which can also be conveyed through imagery. By attempting to use the photo edits to convey the full atmosphere of the image, I feel as if it more properly connected to the literary device of imagery.