Family Dynamics

Artist Statement

Considering most people are staying home during the current pandemic and online school will continue for the rest of this school year, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to interact with my family. I can visit them during the average school day just by entering another room, and talk with my sister during our lunch break in the afternoon. April break held even more opportunities to spend time with my family, as well as contact friends and extended family. Whenever I found myself spending time with family with my phone nearby I would take a photo, and the two included were the ones I thought had the most logical composition.

I did most of the photo editing in the Photos application similar to how I edited my last photojournalism image. However, I did use photoshop for a few different things—for example, for the first image, my sister’s headphones were on the ground in the unedited image. I used the spot healing tool to remove them fro the background because they were a bit distracting and didn’t take up much space in the composition of the image. I also applied the diffuse glow filter, reducing its intensity quite a bit but allowing it to emphasize the glow of the phone screens. In Photos, I increased the saturation, the highlights, and the contrast. I decreased the brilliance, exposure, shadows, brightness, and black point. I used the select color feature to emphasize the cooler colors in the image, especially blue and purple, because I had increased the cast of the image as well as increased the saturation when there were already mostly warm colors present in the image. To balance it out, I increased the saturation of light and dark blue as well as the more purple shades of the photo, which also helped the phone screens stand out. I decreased the saturation of red a little bit. I added a slight vignette effect with low strength, increasing the softness. For the second image, my only edit in photoshop was adding a slight diffuse glow filter to that image as well. In Photos, I decreased the exposure, shadows, black point, and cast while increasing the highlights, brightness, contrast, and saturation. Using the select color feature I increased the saturation of green in the image slightly, as it was the most noticeable color in the image. I added the vignette effect to this image as well. Finally, I cropped the image so that the subject was closer to the center of the image.

I took the first photo while my sister was texting a friend of hers, and my father was calling my grandfather on his phone. Taking the photo itself from an outside perspective reminded me of the use of technology during this time and how it’s an important tool in staying connected with my extended family. My family has been safely staying connected to extended family during the pandemic through the use of technology, which is what the image was meant to show. The second image was one I took while my sister and I were walking back to our house from the mailbox—both during school days and on vacation we’ve gotten into a habit of going for a walk usually every other day to get outside and get some fresh air, even in rainy weather sometimes. It’s nice to be able to do this and talk with her so often, so I included that image to represent how my family is growing closer during this time and finding some positivity in the middle of the current world events.