To respond to Anthropocene through the study of Matthew Brandt I have decided to photograph reservoirs. as I have previously done a case study of his work, I know one of the subjects he decided to dedicate a project to were reservoirs and lakes. this fit perfectly with my plan as what I planed to do, from the beginning. his way of working is very abstract and because I have never previously produced prints in such a way.

I went to Val De La Mare during midday and these are the photographs I have produced:

What I found the most challenging was to photograph against the light, as I liked that area a lot , however it was tricky to find a balance between the sky and the land as one always turned out overexposed/underexposed.

Sub-Selection

These images were mainly selected based on the exposure, as there was a significant difference between overexposed photographs, I tried picking ones that looked presentable, but I knew that after having a go at editing them I would have a much more narrowed down choices for my final image selection, as not many that I picked, I was able to “rescue” from being overexposed.

Editing

As Matthew takes his photographs by a film camera, I wanted to replicate that effect of a film camera on my own images.

Firstly what I did was to try to get a film look on my images in Lightroom. I slightly tinted these greener and have darkened them, I didn’t want them to be overexposed as then there would be a huge area of just white.

After slight changes I had a plan to put a few substances on them, this is why I needed to find a colourful effect, representing film, however it also meant when the images are soaked in water or other liquids the colours of a overlaid image will show through and create a more of a colourful effect.

I have found an image which acted as overlay of film on my own image. This was a colourful overlay with different combination of colours blended together softly.

I have then opened this image up in Photoshop and using Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C I copied it .

I have also opened my previously edited image from Lightroom into photoshop. Using the copied image done before, I pasted it on top of my own image, by using Ctrl+V.

By pressing Ctrl+T I was able to transform the overlay on top of my own image .

On the right of the screen, in the Layers box, I changed the Opacity of the overlay. In this case I change it to 54%, but with other images I have stayed in the range of 40-60% opacity.

These were my final results after changing the desired photographs in Photoshop.

The differences in the process on the other images apart from the one I explained were that I experimented with different overlays, opacities and have sometimes rotated the overlay if I wanted a specific colour to show in a designated area.

After I was happy with how the photographs looked in Photoshop I have printed them out to experiment on them.

At home I have used many chemicals this including, bleach which created the vibrant blue/violet mark on the photographs, nail polish remover which created more of clear stains as well as some purple ones in some photographs, I have also melted baking soda and salt for texture. after cleaning the photographs, so that when I burn them the fumes wouldn’t be as toxic, I have used a lighter to burn some holes in one of the photograph, but also what I noticed is when I tried to do that with another photograph it has caused the print to crack and the colour layer to split.

The print bellow has a very visible mark in the middle of it, because of the lighter outline around it. this outline was created because of the baking soda that I have put on before.

The lighter, more white-looking stains are because of the liquids applied after baking soda and salt was already on them, but the stains with a redder outline are caused by the nail polish remover, which reacted in a different way to bleach as this time it picked up redder tones in the print rather than bluer that were done with bleach.

This photoshoot was to respond to the topic of Anthropocene while exploring the methods and style of Matthew Brandt. I liked how physical and creative Matthew gets when producing his photographs, this is why I have developed that idea, however using completely different substances. He involves the environment in his photographs, like collecting the water from reservoirs he photographs, I had an opportunity to this however I chose not to because I wanted to relate this photoshoot with Anthropocene. To do that I have used toxic substances that are really harmful for a human as well as the planet. These substances usually end up in our environment and even in reservoirs. So through these photographs that I created I wanted to show how harmful these chemicals are and how much they are destroying our environment, because of human use.