Learning Environment

Artist Statement

Because the learning environment prompt felt similar to what I did for my school photo—I already showed a picture of some of the ‘landscape’ of my learning environment because I captured a picture of my desk for ‘school’, as it was where almost all of my work happened—I needed to find a different way to capture the room. Changing up the composition was necessary, and I thought a good way to do that could be taking a photo through something like the windows of the doors on one side of the room. I tried to vary the angles of the images I captured to make sure I still showed my desk, but also some of the other features of the room. These include the plants near the large windows in the background of the image, the many books shown in the left of the image, and the natural light streaming into the room.

For editing, I again resorted to the diffuse glow filter. I still really like the effect it has on sunlight in my images, and it makes the natural light in the room more obvious. After I applied the filter, I used the dodge tool to highlight other objects in the room that the diffuse glow filter affected less. I wanted lots of the objects in the room to stand out to show all of my learning environment during online school, so I added highlights at a fairly low opacity to many of the things in the room—for example, the flowerpots, my laptop, and the door in the front of the image. After that, I added a border to the photo using the rectangular selection tool and the paintbrush tool. I did this because the angle and depth of the image didn’t capture the whole of the room or door, making the photo feel more incomplete than it was despite having a more interesting composition than if I simply held the camera perfectly horizontally and parallel to the doors. To try and get rid of this feeling, I added the solid border around the image to provide a frame for it. I then put the image into Photos and made various edits such as: increasing the brilliance, decreasing the highlights, slightly increasing the brightness and contrast, and slightly decreasing the shadows. I added a vignette effect and moved the slider on intensity all the way down, increasing the radius and softness a little afterward. I liked how all of these edits added to the lighting of the image, because one of my favorite things about the room that I call my learning environment is all the windows that let in the sunlight on nice, sunny days.

Overall, I think the image certainly reflects my learning environment in the nicer spring weather especially. I would say the least accurate thing about the image is how organized everything was compared to last week before I organized the papers that were lying around a little bit, but the organization varies each week. As I stated before, my favorite thing about the space is that the windows allow a lot of sunlight to enter the room. The nice weather helps me focus more on my schoolwork and contributes to a peaceful environment. Although I miss regular school because of the social aspect of it and all of the other little things that online school is lacking, my learning environment highlights one of the better parts of online learning, which is comfort and staying somewhat connected to the outdoors.