Shadow

A landscape photo of a heart shape. The left side of the heart is black paper, and the right side of the heart is made from the shadow of the paper. The photo is mainly black-and-white and is darkly lit.
50mm | 1/400 | f2 | ISO 3200

The prompt for this photo was “shadow”. I had the idea to use shadows to create some sort of image. I chose to do this by making half of a symmetrical shape and casting a shadow of the other half to complete it. I went with a heart, since it was a pretty simple shape. I cut half of a heart out of paper and taped it to my desk so it was standing up. Then, I turned on my lamp and angled it such that the shadow completed the heart. Then, I photographed it at different angles to test out what made it look the best. I decided on this photo, but because I had to take it in the dark, there was a lot of grain. I fixed this in Photoshop by copying and blurring the layer, then masking it to the shape I wanted to remove grain from. I did this with the table and the shadow. Overall, I’m quite happy with the result, and am interested to see how more complicated shapes would turn out.