The original picture was taken in the main Severance Hall lounge/study area. In that area there are artistic representations of trees that double as lights at night. The photo was taken close up to evoke a sense of the abstract nature of the design, especially when you can’t see the whole thing, the way I framed the image pretty much already included a sorting cropping of the original piece.
The changes I made to the image are overall minor but successful for what I was trying to do . Firstly the Image was cropped to draw more focus on the intersecting branches in the middle while the big leaves frame the edges. Secondly, a filter was used to make the white “leaves” look more green and to give the image an overall more natural feel. Basically making it look more like an actual tree.
One of Riechers’ final questions is ” Do the photo selections feel inspired or generic?” for me taking a picture of an artistically fake tree up close to where it’s not even obvious that it’s a tree is a very inspired choice, so is what the next edit in which I experimented with more filters until I chose this whacky one which evokes alien foliage.
Riechers, A. (2024). Visual Grammar for Photography. In The Elements of Visual Grammar: A Designer’s Guide for Writers, Scholars, and Professionals (pp. 141–161). Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.6047949.10
No Generative AI was used in the writing or editing in this post.
I really appreciate the subject you chose for these images. The object in itself is of course, a fake plant, so I think it is cool how you acknowledged both aspects of that within your work. The second image of course invoking the “plant” and leaning into its natural shape, and the third image invoking the “fake” with its outlandish colors.
I like how you leaned into the nature side of things from it being based on a plant for one option and fake for the other. You definitely changed the photo in a way that changed the feeling/meaning behind it in a successful way.