Series of 12 surrealistic photographs, utilising pink colour palettes 

“Expiring beauty” captures the chimerical possibility of today’s man-made world reclaimed by nature, raising awareness on the expiring beauty within this artificial world. This work was completed as my HSC Visual Arts Major Work.

Using Adobe Photoshop, I applied the technique of double exposure (photo manipulation) to fuse greenery and flora with man-made buildings and colour grading to achieve the green to pink effect. The final step was to use the camera raw filter to make the pink colour a certain tone. All photos and assets are photographed and created by me. I used light room to edit the pictures by making them muted and hazy. 

I really wanted to achieve that effect of flora being part of something man-made, possessing a surreal quality that fabricates a fantastical land. Attempting to make my first double exposure image was challenging, where I realised I was being a perfectionist in creating that "aesthetic vision", making me less productive. To overcome this challenge, I stopped obsessing over the order of the process as that made me stressed and restricted. Instead, I just focused on acting and documenting as I go, where eventually my active productivity led to a final product. 

Another challenge I went through was editing my existing photos (seen at the bottom) with a pink tone and colour to create a more whimsical and fairy-tale quality. The amount of failures I went through made me less motivated to continue refining my images with that pink effect. So, rather than experimenting, I felt that I should search online for methods that change green to pink. 

In the image below, I used the camera raw filter to change the hue, saturation and luminance of each colour window to create the glowing windows on a traditional building. Fun fact - This building was taken in Rockdale! It resembled a Studio Ghibli building so much, that it compelled me to fabricate a dreamy and almost animated version of this building. 

In the image below, I used the setting "Light Colour" to bring out the room's interior structure more. The clone stamp was used to blend the "greenery" as a surrealism element. 

Here are my works before I applied the colour grading effect.