Artist Statement:

For the "Love is" photo, I thought about what I like to do in my free time. I knew it would be hard to get a picture of myself playing a sport like tennis, or sailing (sailing especially because it is winter). So I started to think of other ideas it was pretty obvious. I would do a photo of programming. At first, I thought of getting a photo of me programming but I decided against that for two reasons. First, it would be hard to get both me and the code in the text without one being out of focus and very blurry. The second reason is because what I love about programming is when it is all finished I sit back hit run and it works. So I ended up doing the photo on some finished code that I had saved. When I was taking the shot I originally just was going to do a shot looking directly onto the code. I took it but didn't like it as there was nothing special about it. I then took some using angle up and angle down. I didn't like the angle down as much mostly because everything was upside down, but also because you could see the bottom the monitor and part of my desk. So I used the angel-up shot.

When I was editing the raw image I noticed that the image was very bright with little contrast so I put on an adjustment layer and boosted the contrast to 146 and the brightness to -150. This fixed most of the image but then I also put a filter to lower the exposure a little bit. After that, I just used the burn tool at a bit to darken a few last areas and I was all set. Overall I like this image because of the contrast of the different colored text on the dark background. I also like that the shot is angled up.