Growth: A Senior Black + White High Dynamic Range Diptych by Parker Jue (2016)

With these two images I wanted to display how an individual can actually grow from being ignored. The fish image represents the feeling of being ignored. If you stop paying attention to a pet, such as a fish, they will suffer because they can’t take care of themselves. And in certain situations people can feel this way too. Additionally, when you are ignored, a feeling of loneliness can stem from that, this is why the fish is the only thing in the photograph. In the right image, there is a plant with a flower. This represents the growth. When an individual is left to do things on their own they have potential to grow. The flower is the individual and the additional branches in the photo represent the areas of growth such as independence, confidence, knowledge, and so on.

I created this diptych in Adobe Photoshop. Each image in the diptych consists of five images, so I had to merge those first. Before putting the images side by side, I edited them individually. The first thing that I did was make the images black and white. Then I played around with the levels of each image until I found a contrast that I liked. Additionally, I made specific changes to the fish and the flower by making selections and changing the brightness in order to make them stand out more. One thing that didn’t turn out the way I had hoped was the flower image, it turned out a little more blurry than I wanted it to. But I was able to minimize some of that blur by using the stamp tool in order to fix the parts that did not overlap perfectly. One of the only things I would change is leaving the images in color, because these images had some really nice colors to them.