Senior Gaby Mezzacappa said that the theme of her project (this picture being a part of that) was “steel”. Gaby spoke about her motivation for choosing this certain theme and said she is “…really interested in close-up shots and texture, so [she] got close as [she] possibly could to a rusting chain link, and took pictures of it.” She also said that this particular steel chain link was very unique and beautiful due to the way it naturally rusted and changed color, and wanted to capture that. The edit that Gaby made to her photo on Photoshop increased the saturation of the colors in the picture to make the colors in the picture appear warmer and “richer”.

Senior Ally Mueller took this picture of a large hawk flying over a  forest landscape. Ally originally took the picture for a nature project in Intermediate Photography. “I took [this photo] in Florida on vacation. There were just a bunch of birds flying around and I happened to take a picture of one just as it was flying by.” Ally spoke about how the weather was very nice and the lighting of the sky looked well to her, so she decided to go outside and take a photo. Ally edited this photo using Photoshop; she brightened the photo’s lighting, and changed the photo’s coloring to a photo effect called “Sepia” which changes the photo’s colors to only brown shades to resemble the reddish-brown tint associated with monochrome photos of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Senior Alex Cherry took this picture in Thailand for a self design project, similar to Advanced Photo classmate and Senior Colleen Jones’ photo. “I really liked the blue house and it’s reflection on the water…I was taking a riverboat ride and we passed this house which was a fairly typical one on the river, except for the house’s brilliant blue color.” Alex, when editing on Photoshop, wanted to highlight the house’s reflection on the water and bring out the warmer colors in the image to convey to the viewer what this house really looked like in person; he increased the saturation of the picture in order to bring out the reflection of the house on the water, and cropped the picture to centralize the viewer’s focus.

Senior Colleen Jones took this picture last year for a self-design project during the snow-storm last winter. “I really love winter so it seemed like the perfect time [to take the picture]. I just really loved how the snow wasn’t melting in her hair…I tried to capture the snow as naturally as possible; the way it fell in her hair, completely untouched by anything.  It seemed like it would make the snow itself stand out.” Even though Colleen does not like editing pictures very much (for example, on Photoshop) because she feels it takes away the natural state of the object, she brightened the lighting in the photo because the original photo was very dark and needed to increase the clarity of the image.