Whilst at the Jersey zoo I took an a lot of images, mostly focusing on plants and flowers being grown around the site, but also some of the animals enclosures. I wanted the focus on the natural shapes and colours found within the plants, and used Adobe Lightroom to edit my images, mostly increasing the saturation to make the images a little more visually pleasing.

To begin, I only made a few small adjustments, increasing the exposure and contrast and eventually got into the more advanced editing settings, increasing the amount of blue in the shadows using the Colour Grading wheels. By increasing the blue I feel that I made the water a bit more pleasant to look at, as in the original image it appears to be quite murky.

By comparing my images with Kawauchi’s I can see how successful I am in emulating the style of one of my artist references. Kawauchi’s image is from her photobook Illuminance, and depicts water droplets on a spider’s web, with plants surrounding it. These plants have red stems, which contrasts the green of the leaves and she uses a shallow depth of field to draw attention to the webs and the droplets. Kawauchi’s images are taken on film cameras and are square, contrasting my image which was taken on a digital camera and cropped to be portrait. My image has more of a focus on the texture of the leaves over colour but does also use a shallow depth of field. The image was taken through glass which leaves some of the reflection in the final image, which I feel adds an extra amount of visual interest.