Michael Zimney - Bright Color - Crit 2 Recipe

            For my recipe I chose my photo of stacked colored blocks as my POW.  I used an IPhone 5 with the app “Camera360 (version 4.8)”.  The phone was initially set to the “basic color” setting.

Techniques – After my daughter had stacked her blocks I noticed that they might be an excellent representation of color.  I got very low and close so that I was on the same level and intimate with the blocks.  I took several shots and did not like the shadows that were coming across so I adjusted the light in the room so that there was no shadows on the blocks.  I then tried several different angles and distances until I got the shot that I eventually submitted.  This shot involved me bringing the phone very close to the ground and maybe 1 foot away from the stack of blocks.

Strategies – My goal with this shot was to explore bright, contrasting colors in an attempt to see what kind of feeling or emotion they might elicit.  I purposefully avoided shadows, in that I did not want them to affect the purity of the colors.  My hope was to manage to create emotional reactions.  Throughout all of my shots this section, I held to the same theme, which was to take things that were ordinary or mundane and try to frame them from a different perspective so as to create art.  In the photos that had contrasting colors my goal was to not have those differences be subtle, but rather, create stark and sharp edges between the objects of color so that each color could stand out from the other but, work in conjunction with each other.  Additionally, with this shot I wanted to try to retain as much purity as possible, so I did very little in the way of adjustments.  I spent more time getting the lighting and angles the way I wanted them pre-photo.

Recipe – Again, my goal was to do as little post-production as possible.  Once I had adjusted the lighting and had the shot I wanted, I used a cropping tool just to take a bit of the edges off and get the blocks framed just the way I wanted.  After that, I did use the sharpening tool to make the blocks as crisp as I could.  I actually adjusted the sharpness as far as it would go.  After this, I used a very little bit of the saturation tool (maybe 8%) just to enhance the already vibrant colors a little bit more.  That was all I did to affect the photo.  I did much more pre photo than post.