Transport: A Junior Conceptual Transport Project by Benjamin Shell (2017)

The reason I choose a skateboard as my object was because of the effect it had on my youth. When I was in elementary school, I was fascinated that my neighbor had a skateboard. So my mom got me one for my birthday. I rode that little Target to my heart’s content till it eventually worn out. I remember getting my first “real” skateboard from the skate shop at Downtown Los Altos. From then on, I really go into skating and it was how I met many of my friends. I eventually stopped skating about a year and a half ago due to a broken collarbone and haven’t picked it up since. Slowly, most my friends and I stopped skating. Now we never skate. So for me, this skateboard represent an item that very important in my growing up. This is why I choose the skateboard for my item. I really wanted to explore unique angles of this simple object. This is why I wanted to get a side on perspective of the board and wheel because I feel that people, myself included, only look at skateboards straight on. The streaks of sunlight coming through the background were sort of a happy accident. That wasn’t my original intention but it ended up adding a cool effect to the image. I choose to use the shallowest depth of field that I could because I wanted to limit the focus on the background as much as possible. There was a lot going on in the background and I wanted to limit the viewer’s attention to that. Thankfully, it isn’t that distracting. If I had the ability to, I would want to get the same angle and lighting with this shot but with a simpler background.

The big take away that I learned from Photoshop over the course of these couple weeks is that your edits are only as good as your selections. Most of what we have learned in Photoshop so far is based on selections and how you can use these selections. To me, this was fascinating. The possibilities were basically endless as long as you made the proper selections. The same goes for masking. Masking, in some regard, is just another form of edits with selections. For my image, I cropped the image down to focus more on the attention on the board. The original image had a lot more background off to the side. The next thing I did was work on the front wheel. I wanted to apply some of the recent skills we learned in Photoshop in my photo. I didn’t like how the lighting was making the front wheel look so I decided to change it. I used the quick selection tool and selected the front wheel. Then I decreased the saturation of the front wheel. This really gave the front wheel a more natural look to it and made it look less fake. The lighting in the original image, for whatever reason, made the wheel look quite fake and plastic. After this, I used the same selection and inversed the selection as to make it select everything but the front wheel. With this, I increased the hue to give the photo a little bit more blue to it. Then, on the entire photo, I decreased the exposure a little bit because the original was a bit too bright. Overall, I used the skills we learned in Photoshop to add a few subtle changes to this image which holds a lot of nostalgic value to me.