Continuing with the photos I took of the plant life in Hawaii, the below image is of a small patch of asian sword fern. It's a very common fern, although not native to the island.I appologize for the length of this post, feel free to skim over the things that may not enrich your reading....
This fern grows near the ground, and can grow to about knee or waist height. The ferns in the images below are only about five inches tall, so I was actually on my knees when I took this photo.
Photographer's notes: taken at 1/6th sec, at f/36, ISO 100. Made sure I had a slow enough shutter speed to play with, but also had a decent exposure so that my histogram was pushed to the right. If you're wondering, your histogram is a graph, and it shows you how much information you have captured in your image. The farther left and right it is pushed, the more info you have. I always make sure that it is pushed as far right as posible (toward the light side) so that when I get home I have enough info to play with. Although, I just found a Freeman Patterson quote that read: "if you have 36 perfectly exposed photos when you get home, you haven' t done anything new" I'm paraphrasing, but you get the idea.
In this setting, the ground framed the ferns in two paralel rectangles, in a horizontal type visual. So, to accentuate the verticality of the ferns, I moved my camera up and down during the exposure -here I am using the word exposure to refer to the length of time that my sensor is exposed to the world's light to make the image, not to refer to my histogram.
I was delighted to see that despite the motion, you can still destictly see the horizontal leaves on the blade of the fern. This gives the fern the look of a comb.
This is the original framing of the photo, but later I made a crop:
I made this crop, because I wanted to focus in on one of the most distinct "combs" in the photo. I was also attracted to the "V" that is formed around the center blade. This forms a pleasing group of three. After I made the crop, I processed this image as it's own image, forgetting it's origins. I think this is important, because the framing IS the image basically. The image would not exist without the method in which it is framed; therefore, when you change the framing, you have a new image.
So looking at this image now, I realized that I had the opportunity to play with the colours to make a very distict relationship between complimentary colours. I changed the saturation, luminosity, and even the hue to make the green "pop". These two colours are directly opposite each other on the colour wheel, making them complimentary. If you think I got it wrong, please leave your suggestion in the comments.
I was surprised and delighted with how this image turned out, as I always am with abstracts. The group of three, the "V" and the complimentary colours were unplanned, and it's amazingly inspiring and captivating when I can bring that out in the darkroom.
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