A creative process is something that people can rarely see, the end product is what is presented to us in front of our eyes. So I've decided to tell the story about how the final images below arrived, but I wont go into technical details but more what I was thinking as I took the pictures and then why I edited them like I did .
Note: All my pictures are taken when i have my headphones in and as such each one has a song associated to it
Song: Heavenly Father Bon Iver
Autumn colors make for great images, its just not quite cold enough for people to stay cooped up inside and just not quite warm enough for people not want to wrap up warm and as you can see in this image snuggle. Yes snuggle is a technical term. I used a 230mm zoom lens for this picture and framed it once in landscape with lots of empty space on one side which told an entirely different story to this one. In portrait however i was able to capture the grandeur of the crags beyond the couple sitting on the bench.
This coupled with the fact that there are no other people in the shot makes it seem that they are living in their own little world. This is the first running theme in my photos, I want show that people have their own personal stories that are separate and distinct from our own. In this particular image it is quite an intimate moment where these two probably felt as though they were the only two people in the whole world and as such I tried to capture that perceived sentiment
Editing wise the sky on this day was grey but the ground has autumnal colors on it so I upped the overall warmth of the image( because it is a warm cosy moment ) . The adding of a vignette round the bottom is there to focus the image on the center and the two subjects, whilst the brighter backdrop gives a sense of hope and draws our eye upwards through the image in the same way when on this particular hill I find my eye to always be drawn upwards towards the sky.
Song: Montana - Youth Lagoon
We can still see the running theme in these pictures of the lil hidden stories that happen around us in our everyday lives. This picture is particularly significant because it was originally a landscape image and in every quadrant of the monument with the pillars were different people doing their own different things. The reason I chose to focus on these two was their positioning nice and centrally between the two pillars, you really gain a sense of perspective when again you look up through the image of how they are so small compared to their surroundings yet are the most interesting part of the photograph . I think there is something in that ,stick on a t-shirt or something.
Editing was pretty simple I brought the warmth of the image way down to give it a blue effect and then just removed the saturation to create this kind of greyish silver tone. The thinking behind these simplistic tones is that so we focus on the two subjects in the frame and nothing else. I also could have deleted the crane in the background but opted against it, mostly because I'm far too lazy and do not have the dexterity to rub it out, because I see now that it gives a sense of scale and height to the image.
I don't know why they were there or what they were talking about, that's for you to decide.
