KayleeAnnPhoto

For my final project, I chose to do ‘life’. The subjects I chose, are my [adult] cat- mid life, my puppy- youth, and the dead stuff [plants] in my backyard- old age/end of life/death. I think that showing the little aspects through life are significant, through symbolizing things that resemble them.

YOUTH- Kahlua follows me around everywhere and she loves the camera so I had to take pictures of her, so she wouldn’t annoy me by trying to play. Gosh, that goober. She’s such a girl..always wants attention.

This is Kahlua, purebred Rottweiler, almost 7 months old, almost 60 pounds, and one big ball of energy. She just got spayed so she has to stay in the house, and she lays down everywhere because her belly still hurts. She followed me into my mom’s room so I tried to get different angles, but every time I’d get a good angle, she’d move! and this one actually focused despite her jitterbugness.

While at the vert she had just got her nails clipped, nails are alive, they grow. I didn’t actually notice how weird they looked until after I took this picture, but I like it. It looks like she has mini hooves between her fingers. Do dogs have fingers? That doesn’t sound right.

And there’s the death glare. She’s pretty good at it, I’d say. This picture made me mad in PhotoShop because it’s not really focused on anything but her right eye [on the left of the picture], which is slightly cut off, I tried using unsharp mask but it didn’t really help.

MID AGE- Snickers is one of the laziest cats EVER. Yes, cats are normally lazy. but she does nothing. And she’s not fat either, how does that work?! She’s about 9 years old now, so she’d a middle aged adult cat. She’s a huge lovebug and will let anyone [except Kahlua] be around her. She didn’t mind our huge rottie but once we get a pup rottie, we she’s like ‘no way in heck will i let that huge thing near me’.

I used Unsharp mask, levels, and curves to edit this one, I added more green to contrast the orangeness to it, and added blue to contrast the redness. I took this using my image stabilizer on my camera to focus on her paw, trying to get the little details.

I used unsharp mask and curves on this picture because I wanted to define the focused points of the photo and take away the redness, that was from the orangish lighting in my mom’s room. The black hairs under her nose are from her tail- I find distracting and the blurred paw in the right corner also.

DEAD- Ha, okay so ‘dead’ sounds harsh. But it is the end of life and it’s acted upon more than any other part of life. So, winter killed my plants. Ice cold temperatures and snow, yup that’ll do it.

So, I have no idea which plant this is but when it was alive, it was not this ugly at all! That’s all I know. I don’t like the neutrality to the tones, I tried putting different colors in it with Curves, but without making it too much of a color, it was almost impossible for me.

A wooden fence, it [the wood] was once alive. I like this picture for how you can see all the way down the fence horizontally and it focuses at the starting point, the closest area [of the fence] to me. I used unsharp mask to try to make the slivers sharper.

There used to be flowers in this big ol’ pot, and they were beautiful. But now, not so much anymore.. the white ball things add contrast against the soil, I really like that aspect. I also like how the edge of the pot curves across the top of the photo, giving it more boundary, more limits. I used Clarity in camera raw and unsharp mask to define the focal points.

NOT ALIVE. I just liked this picture.

I’ve always wanted to try to get a picture like this. Something so small focused and the entire background blurred as to where you can’t even tell what it is. I think it turned out well for my first time trying this.