Another Beauty (2022)
“Another Beauty” is a photographic composition project that I worked on in my first year of university, and was the first project I ever worked on throughout the duration of my degree.
Essentially, we needed to take a variety of photographs related to a specific theme, then choose one of them and experiment with the tools on Photoshop and colour grade it to match the specific theme.
I chose to do a photoshoot at Carr Mill Dam, a local woodland local to me in St. Helens, as we associate “Beauty” with nature and there was plenty of material around the dam which was enticing enough to take photographs of.
I chose this specific image because I thought it encapsulated the dam perfectly, because the most prominent part of the dam is the large body of water in the centre. Furthermore, by capturing the sky in the photograph, I could grade the image to look like a sunset, further emphasising the beauty theme because we typically associate the sunset as something “beautiful”.
For my first-ever stab at Photoshop and photo composition, this was solid work and still holds up. I have very good visual skills and tried to think of other images that I have scene of Carr Mill Dam when taking my photograph, taking advantage of skills learned from Sixth Form such as the rule of thirds, as well as the settings on my phone to ensure the best shot is taken.
If I could do anything differently next time, I would’ve used a camera instead of my phone. It would have been an excellent way to get used to the equipment that I would later come to utilize in my course, and I would have been able to get through the “growing pains” of learning the equipment much faster.
Additionally, I would have made the colour grading more subtle. When I originally did this, I cranked the saturation up to the max to make the colours vibrant. However, I understand now that this can be visually jarring and unrealistic, and thus I have learned to reduce the intensity of the saturation.
Overall, this was a strong attempt at the photographic composition brief, and I have proved to have excellent visual skill and have developed my skills from Photoshop from this brief. However, I think I should have utilized the university equipment and reduced the intensity of the colour grading.
Below are my other interpretations of my photograph. I graded one of them green to make it look otherworldly and abstract, and the other was graded with more realistic, yet still abstract colours due to the emphasis on the blues and yellows. They are nevertheless still strong interpretations with a clear, well-thought out theme.
