Rollerblades: A Junior Conceptual Transport Project by Mackenzie Bystrom (2017)

For this assignment, I chose to focus on roller blades. In the bright orange morning sunlight, I set the roller blades on the walkway up to my front door, in front of some flowers. I felt the orange on the main subject and foreground contrasts nicely with the green background, which I did edit to make slightly subtler and less saturated. I think the bright sunlight managed to make the photo look warm, but to a comfortable degree, rather than being too harsh. I think the warm light gave it a nice, light-hearted feeling. I wanted to get across the feeling of the pleasant memories I have when I used to go rollerblading frequently, the warm peaceful feeling of rolling around during the warm summer days, not a care in the world. I decided to shoot the rollerblades as close to ground as I could get, and focused with the front wheel of one of the rollerblades close up, to emphasize the years of rollerblading the wheels had gone through

While editing the photo, I cropped a small amount off the right side of the photo to get the front wheel closer to an intersection on the Rule of Thirds. While editing, I learned that subtle differences are usually the best, as when I edited the background garden to be slightly less saturated, it looked really strange when it was too desaturated, but didn’t look as good left alone. I think applying this rule of photoshop helped make the contrast more subtle, but still noticeable, with the desaturated greenish background contrasting the highly saturated and bright warm foreground. In the image, I specifically selected outside of the roller blades and cement walk way so I only selected the garden in the background, and desaturated slightly. In the foreground, the selection of rollerblades and the walkway, I made it slightly warmer to give it a more appealing a more comforting feel, helping get across the emotion of nostalgia for freedom.