Week 16: Image Series

*Please let me know if a photo does not appear

Artist Statement:

With all three photos, I wanted to have an element in common, so I decided to have the basketball in all the photos. I also was hoping to have a repeating element, balance, in all the photos, but I did not achieve that with the third photo. With the first photo, my dog did not come out that well, the photo was underexposed, so I made the photo brighter, by looking at a tutorial (will explain with the third photo). With the text, I used bevel and embossed to have the words have texture to them, as well as a stroke, that outlined the text. I did this to all the photos. I picked the text color to be of that of the basketball, with the eyedropper tool. To achieve the fading effect, I put a layer mask and increased the feather. I made it fading because I originally wanted some of the text to behind some of the grass, I could not really achieve that. I played around, and I got this fading effect, I really liked it, so I kept it. With the second photo, I used the same text effect because I wanted it to be the same in all three photos, so they have that in common. Although you may notice the colors are a different variation, I choose to do this because in the first photo, the basketball came out really light. However, in the second and third, it was darker, so I experimented and liked it when they all had different colors of text. I feel like that making the text effect the same makes them cohesive, but the color ties the pictures together with the text. For the second photo, I also placed the text behind JJ's leg by creating a layer mask. I did this because I did not like the text covering up his leg. With the third photo, believe or not, I spent the longest time editing. I took this photo on a really gray day, and the photo was underexposed entirely (the basketball was like a shadow - that underexposed), and I did not realize that until looking at the photos later. So to brighten the photo I made the levels layer (usually it is under normal) and put it on "screen." This fixed the photo really well, but the basketball was still super dark, so I did the same thing, but with a layer mask, covering only the basketball, to brighten the basketball. This worked amazingly, except the basketball did not look that natural, because the shadows were all messed up (the basketball was super bright, it looked like the sun on a clear day), so I changed the opacity to help the basketball blend it. This really helped, and that is how I got to these three photos. I did not do anything that different from text effects, because I wanted this photo to be straightforward.