Vis Lit Final May 5, 2009

When trying to decide what to do for my final project I decided that I would work in Rock Creek Park because throughout the semester I haven’t been able to take landscape pictures or work with nature at all. I decided to work with the storyline of a girl walking to the park, girl meets boy and then girl slips in mud and boy helps her, making the last shot be of them in together. In regards to the final I was more concerned with the visual aspect of the pictures versus the actual story line. I wanted to get each shot to stand out and be interesting by itself. The day that my “actors” were free it was raining so I decided to work with that. I took two very bright umbrellas and made them the center of attention in each picture, rather than the actors. This was effective until we reached the actual park because the bright blue and green of the umbrellas seemed extremely subdued in comparison to leaves and fauna at the park.
I wanted a contrast with the umbrellas and the leaves on the trees with the outfits that my “actors” were wearing. I had the girl wear a plain black and white jacket because I wanted her to look washed out in comparison to the actual trees and the greenery. The guy was wearing a light blue shirt, which I thought would was out well with the black and white jacket, when in reality it was difficult to show the contrast with it. In order to make this part of my final more effective I had to up the contrast and saturation in every picture. In this way I feel like it made the pictures stand out more than they would of originally.
There were a few visual aspects that I wanted to include in my photo story. Some worked and some didn’t but that’s expected. One was that I wanted to capture the rain coming off of the umbrellas in a few pictures but even though it was raining very hard it wouldn’t come up in the photographs. The reason that I included the picture of the sign that says ‘Trail’ is because it showed the rain dripping off of the sign(to prove that the girl and boy weren’t just walking around on a sunny day with umbrellas) and to help further the story line of where the girl was going.
Another aspect that didn’t work as well for me was when we reached the actual park. I had to make the lighting on my camera higher because the trees and forest was extremely dark but I made a mistake when we reached the clearing. I forgot to change the lighting back to the regular setting and because of that the last four photographs are a lot lighter than I would have originally wanted. Once I came back and loaded the photos on my computer I realized this mistake and did the best I could to darken them up to match the others however, to me at least, there is an obvious difference in the lighting in them.
Besides the rain not showing up and my mistake with lighting I believe that the photos came out very well. I wanted the trees and the fauna to balance out some of the photographs and believe that it did. I’m happy with this being my final project.

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