Final Edits

Comparison

This photo was inspired by the photographer Fey Godwin, who took many pictures of different forest landscapes, capturing different lighting in her photos. Her photo includes a clearing with sun rays shining through the trees, the light illuminating a patch of grass in the middle of the photo. I found this composition very effective and decided to try something similar when taking my own photos. I ended up with this image, a small stream flowing through a dense forest. I made sure to capture the sun glowing through the trees from the top corner, reaching the water below. I think the composition of both photos are quite similar, as well as the tonal range present throughout the images. Despite Godwin’s photo being in black and white, the same dark tones in the tree are seen in my coloured image. The sun casts a similar effect, brightening the middle area of the image, and creating an area of focus due to the lighter tones, similar to the artist’s photograph. On the other hand, one of the ways I edited the image was by increasing the contrast of the image, this contrasting with the artist photos as her image appears more hazed, the grass not standing out as much. Moreover, her image consists of a clearer foreground and background, the trees further back appearing lighter and adding depth to the image. In contrast, my photograph captures the curved line of water surrounded in lush woodland, creating a curved leading line running through the image, guiding our eyes through to the back of the image and causing there to be depth in the image. The stream disappearing round a corner also creates a sense of mystery and adventure, adding to the mood of the photo. Godwin’s image creates the impression that she wanted to capture the true beauty and wildness of the forest, using the trees in the background to capture the depth of the forest. I tried to recreate this effect and capture the wild yet beautiful side of the forest.

The inspiration for this paragraph was Ansel Adams, a landscape photographer who sometimes includes abandoned architecture in his photographs, comparing them with the rural landscape around them. He creates this idea of the sublime- how man made buildings break down over time but the nature around them is everlasting. His photo includes a broken down structure with a young tree growing in front of it, a contrast being created between the old, destroyed building and the new life of the tree. I found this concept very effective and perfectly capturing the essence of the sublime, so I decided to photograph an abandoned structure in the middle of a wild, rural landscape- the woodland slowly growing onto the architecture itself. Adams’ also photographed the scene in black and white, something I wanted to recreate in Lightroom. However, instead of black and white, I edited the photo so that it was in blue and yellow shades, since I believed it looked more effective and unique this way. Adams also focused on applying a wide tonal range in his work, which was something I considered when photographing and later editing my image. I wanted my image to have lots of contrasting tones, especially in the trees. Furthermore, I applied the rule of thirds in this photo, composing the photo so that the building appear in one of the thirds so that the other two thirds could be simply wildlife- capturing the idea of there being a lot of healthy, green nature around the decaying building.