When creating images for a particular audience, perspective plays a very large role. For this particular assignment I chose to use a photograph I took last week. It is basically a black and white image of a pile of pumpkins. The farm where I took the photo is a part of my childhood. Every fall my mother would take me there to pick out a few pumpkins for carving. I will always remember the way the farmer would line the pumpkins up in huge pile for the customers to sift through. By changing the perspective of my photograph; both digitally and emotionally, I can recall certain memories of the farm more easily.
In the first image you will notice there are no extreme alterations. It is a straightforward photo of the tops of pumpkins on the farm. I used dimensional perspective to alter the photograph’s meaning just slightly. When taking the picture I used a shallower depth of field. The tops of the pumpkins are sharp and you can see all of the detail, but as you go back things change. The background of the image is very blurry but you can still make out a few farm buildings and some customers walking around the pumpkin piles. I used Photoshop’s blur tool to exaggerate the focus of the objects in back. The use of foreground, middle-ground, and background in images can give an image depth and imply that there is a third dimension to the two dimensional space. When I look at the photo I am filled with memories of running around the farm, climbing over endless piles of pumpkins.
In the second image, I reused the same photograph, but concentrated on emotional perspective to portray the subject matter. In this image you can see that focus is shifted from the pumpkin tops to the mother and son walking in the background. In Photoshop I selected the area around the couple and sharpened and brightened it the best I could. This gave me added detail that would have been lost with my shallow depth of field. I took things a step further by contrasting the rest of the image so that the selection remained bright a sharp. I did this because I was worried that the sharper representation would get lost in the rest of the composition. The resulting selection pops up and draws the viewers’ eyes right in. By concentrating on the mother and son, a viewer can insert themselves into the composition and feel as if they are out on a fall day with their children, shopping for pumpkins. For me, it brings up memories of my mother taking me to the farm and spending time with me browsing the piles of pumpkins for the perfect jack-o-lantern.
When used in images; dimensional perspective, emotional perspective, or a combination of the two, can draw the viewer in and influence the overall meaning.
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