Change

I took these images in the garden outside my house in the morning. The sun had just risen so there was plenty of natural light. I took these images with my digital camera, I used photoshop, the printer, transparency paper and the dark room. I chose to do a series of images to show different stages of a flowers life to show change. There are lines from the leaves, there is a range of value, positive and negative space. There is contrast between the images and how much the picture has in it. There is unity because the flowers are coming from the same plant.

In the images there is a variety of compositions and techniques. There is selective focus in a three. In the top two there is formal balance because the whole frame is filled with the plant, the bottom one is rule of thirds. The leaves and stems are the leading lines and there is grouping from the leaves and flower buds. This final image started as three separate, digital images. They were also much bigger. I used photoshop to put them all together and shrink them. I then turned the image black and white and inverted it using photoshop. I printed two copies the negative on transparency paper. In the dark room I lined up the negatives and taped them. I made a segmented test strip with 4 segments of 2 secs at F11. I chose 3 secs, which was too dark. I decided to stay with 2 secs and the print came out well.

The assignment was to show change. This was hard at first because there are so many different types of change in the world. Because I wasn't going to be able to take any pictures of people making a change in the middle of a school week I decided to look at nature. I feel like as busy people we miss the small changes around us in nature. When we look at flowers we look for the beautiful bloomed ones and we really look at the plant. This project relates to my life because I chose the angle of each image and I chose how I wanted to put them together to show change. I think the image could be stronger if there was more contrast in the pictures, it's kind of grey. To do this I could add a negative to my stack or I could try adding a filter and increase my exposure time.