Week Seven:

Here is my updated final concentration. I did a little bit of editing to straighten out some of the pictures, and got rid of the yellow tint in my hotel photo story. These pictures are in the order that I will submit them to the college board.

 

Throughout my concentration, I used photos of places deserted by people centuries ago, such as my seventh photo, and I also used places that humans are living in and using today, such as my ninth and tenth photos.  When I first started taking pictures for my series, I wanted to do a concentration on growing up in a rural town like the town where I live. However, as time progressed, I decided to take pictures of places that humans had deserted, and show how they left traces wherever they went. Finally, I decided on my series that I finished: how people connect to their landscapes and what they leave behind. I used minimal editing on all of my photographs, but I had to adjust the exposure and contrast in a lot of them. In my concentration series, I used a lot of natural color schemes to represent life. I also used line and repetition to create movement in my pieces, and to show that life isn’t stagnant, and I filled up my pictures so that most of them don’t have a lot of empty space, to communicate how people don’t have empty lives. Finally, I tried to put as many objects and people on the rule of thirds lines as I could to create emphasis.  I did not use abstraction at all in my series because, besides the fact that I’m an OCD person, people don’t see their lives as abstract. They don’t view ordinary things from abstract angles; rather, they see things the way that they are. I want my concentration to be attainable and realistic for the people viewing it. The places that I photograph are places that I personally connect with, and I want anyone who sees my pictures to be drawn to them.