Changing Colors

A Day at the JP Women's Market; 4"x6"

Emily in Desolate Autumnal Wonderland; 12"x12"

For this week’s assignment, I took pictures at the Women’s Market on the grounds of a historic house in JP. When shooting, I was pretty aware of the limitations of my phone’s camera (because my phone is very old) as well as the lighting (it was a pretty cloudy day); this made me be a lot more careful when composing shots, since that was in my control, unlike the picture quality and lighting. I originally wanted to see if I could get pictures of the items for sale, but it felt kind of unnatural to be constantly snapping pictures of things—so I was so excited when I saw the garden in the backyard of the house, because it was a neutral ground where I could take a ton of (pretty nice!) pictures without being in anyone’s way; I also thought it could be cool to play with the connection of women and flowers. I wanted at least one to have an actual person in it, and so my lovely roommate Emily served as my model.

Blue Spruce Candle; 6"x

The images I chose ended up being the ones I thought were the best-composed. I also wanted a variety of textures, shapes and colors. The first two were easy—the pictures I took were already pretty varied in texture and shape. The last, though, was kind of difficult—pretty much everything was some shade of dull green. I wanted some element of miscellany to the collection—as if it was a hodgepodge of products on display. 

Pathway through Greenery; 4"x6"

In post-production, I turned up the brightness and contrast on all of my images, and I also turned up the saturation. The first couple I did were pretty conventional—they look like slightly sunnier and sharper versions of the originals. 

Different kind of '80s vibe; 4"x6"

'80s Vibe?, 4"x6"

I got bored of that pretty quickly, though—I felt like there needed to be some color contrast, something to hold the eye’s attention. I started messing more with the selective color function on Photoshop, bringing out the reds and blues, and giving me this image, which felt very vintage to me. My parents have a photo album of old pictures of them, and I remember seeing one that I assume was from the late ‘70s or early ‘80s that had the same colors. I decided to invert the colors on this one, as well—which led to the creation of this negative space-esque image. I wanted to highlight the shape of the object, and I think this allowed me to do so with bold, complementary colors. With the rest of the images, it almost reads like the changing of the seasons—from a bold, bright summer, to a cool autumn. 

An offering; 4"x6"

My presentation was a little more conventional, but I still made the effort to highlight the shape of the plant holder on the board, constructing a similar shape out of the 4”x6” photos, and leaving the square images in a zig-zag pattern on the left, to help the eye travel to the right side. The overall effect is pensive, and constantly shifting—like a moody take on the change of the seasons. Although this wasn’t my original intent when making the images, in retrospect, it makes sense: summer is my favorite season, and the cooler weather and the changing leaves always make me a little sad, like I didn’t spend enough time doing summer things when I could have. I feel this is especially true in Boston--to me, Boston feels like an entirely different city in the summer than it is in the winter. The end of the summer means the end of Summer Boston, until it cycles back around again.