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Transport: A Junior Conceptual Transport Project by Tyler Buhr (2017)

For this project, we were assigned to take a photo of a wheel from a non-motorized vehicle from a very unusual angle. The object I used for my photo was an old antique tricycle that sits on a mantle over my fireplace. It sits there all day and serves no purpose besides decoration, but I’ve always enjoyed how unique it is. It has a big front wheel with two small handlebars on top. Behind that is a little seat and two back wheels with a basket in between. The whole tricycle is a charcoal greyish color and is made of metal. It gives off a rusty, worn down type feeling even though it isn’t old and I really liked that. I modeled my tricycle on top of my grill which added to the old feeling as the top of my grill was dusty. The top of the grill is also very flat so it was perfect for taking a photo towards the bottom of the wheel. Behind the grill are some ivy vines hanging down and I wanted to get those in my photo to add color. I choose to take my photo at a low angle because the wheels on the tricycle are very hollow and have a lot of open space. This inspired me to take a photo using one of the wheels as I frame. I framed one wheel of the tricycle using another wheel of the same tricycle and I really liked the effect that had. I wanted the effect of having the closer wheel out of focus and having the focus on the farthest wheel. I took this photo in the morning so that the sunlight was coming in from the east. This way it would light my background up but would not put too much sunlight on the tricycle. I did not want too many shadows in the photo because I did not want anymore dark aspects.

Adobe Photoshop is a very powerful tool and can change almost anything about a photo. We are given so much freedom to edit our photos however we want to fit our artistic ideas. In Photoshop, I started by making the background lighter. In the original photo, the leafs in the background did not pop and add color the way I imagined so brightening them was a start to that process. I then added saturation, which “warms up” the photo. Saturation is a way to remove some of the darks in a photo that may be affecting the mood and lighting. After the photo became lighter, I noticed that it looked unnatural. I did not want to undo any of the lighting I had done so I added shadow to counteract the brightening. This gave the photo the contrast I wanted of darker in the foreground and lighter in the background. There were some dog hairs and little pieces of dirt or rock that made it into the photo and were very distracting. I removed those by using the Color Blend tool, which takes color from around the area you are trying to get rid of and covers the obscenity. After all of these actions, I felt that my photo fit exactly what I wanted and I was done with my process.
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