Crash Landing: A Junior Conceptual Transport Project by Rebecca Pristavok (2017)

For the transport project, I chose to photograph a skateboard. I took photos of the skateboard in several different locations, but the best location was in a tree. I balanced the board between a few branches. I chose to have a very shallow depth of field to make the background completely blurred and out of focus. The background consists of green leaves, part of the tree trunk, and the deck of the skateboard. Due to the board being upside down, I envisioned the photo to represent a crash landing. I chose to place the skateboard in an unusual place, to capture the attention of the viewer and allow them to create their own story about the photo.

I previously learned to select specific objects and sections of photos to enhance or desaturate backgrounds and foregrounds. In my original raw image, I was very happy with how the focus and coloring turned out, so I only enhanced the image slightly. I started out by making a copy of my photo, and adjusting the brightness. My original photo was slightly underexposed, so I added the brightness by 54, and the contrast by 9 to the entire layer. I then selected and saved the front wheel and enhanced the brightness of that by 17. I then took that same saved selection of the front wheel and I enhanced the saturation and the vibrance by 8. I added the saturation before the vibrance, to make sure I don’t oversaturate my photo. Lastly, I made the decision to leave my background very colorful and not adjust the vibrancy or saturation, but just lower the brightness by 1 and add contrast by 9. This helped draw the viewer's attention to the bright and focused wheel.