I am going to provide an accurate and insightful look into what my thought processes were at different stages of production and how I produced my final images. This will hopefully result in the reader having a better understanding of how and why I produced what I have.

Anthropocene

I was tasked with capturing the topic of anthropocene. This is defined by the effect that the human species has had on our planet. It is used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. This includes how inventions such as the motor engine have depleted the world of most of its natural resources, through the process of separating crude oil using fractional distillation to produce numerous types of burnable fuel. The combusting of this fuel has filled the Earth’s atmosphere with carbon dioxide and other harmful gases. My intent was to capture how we can see the effects of the anthropocene era today.

Thought Process

My initial first thoughts were that I wanted to show how the human race’s effect on the planet are not all bad. I wanted to show what, why and how these resources have been used effectively to create something new and creative. A good way for me to do this was to photograph new and old structures around the island. The first locations that came to mind were La Hougue Bie and the Financial Buildings located on the Esplanade containing Big Maggy’s Bike Shop. This was a result of La Hougue Bie being built over 6000 years ago, making it one of the oldest structures in the world, and is considered to be one of the best preserved remnants of the Neolithic period in Western Europe. However, when trying to contact someone to visit the site, no reply was received with no phone calls answered. As for the Financial Buildings, the second of the two has just finished construction making them some of the latest architecture on the island. This would provide a distinctive contrast of two eras of human existence and how far we have come as a species.

I stuck with this theme for both my photoshoots, one being modern and the other ancient. I did photograph the Financial Buildings on the same photoshoot as the Waterfront area, but half of the files became corrupted and I couldn’t transfer them from the camera to my computer for further processing. This resulted in much less raw material to work with than I had hoped. Regardless, I decided to do the best I could with what I had available to me. The second photoshoot ran smoothly with no interruptions or problems, providing me with enough images to produce work to a standard.

During the editing stage, I experimented with numerous filters, effects, layering techniques and profiles that Adobe Lightroom provided me with. I made sure to continuously cross reference my artist influences blog post to constantly remind myself of how I wanted the final produce to look. This lead to my work replicating the artist’s to a significant degree, which is what I was aiming for. The effect caused by layering a monochrome filter with a vintage profile over the same image proved to give the best results, as the filter would drain all colour from the image, proceeded by the profile tinting the new image with a chosen colour, taking colour schemes and lighting patterns into consideration. This allowed me to give an oldish/vintage-style effect to any photo I felt would benefit from it. This is precisely what I did for a majority of my best images as it fits the theme well. For the images of modern structures, I used a similar technique with the filter and profile, but I used a contrast preset opposed to a profile. This helped separate and distinguish the lights and darks significantly.

Final Word

Overall, I believe I have successfully achieved my objectives. This is a result of me using careful consideration when planning, performing and editing my photoshoots in order to recreate my artist reference impressions. As previously mentioned, I think that the outcomes from these planned experiments have proven positive results.