Intent3 – JamesA

Encroachment

The goal of this project would be to cate a simple photography blog, featuring pictures that depict a “struggle” between man and nature.

Most nature photography is idyllic: perfect scenes of woods or mountains that have not been touched by man. Oftentimes the pictures are sent through a bright filter to bring out their colors. While these are nice to look at, they aren’t particularly challenging. What if, I thought, I could take nature photographs that achieve the opposite effect? I decided to focus on things that had been put into nature by humans, and then remove rather than enhance the colors to show the actual nature we pass through every day. I wanted to show that nature can sometimes co-exist with humans, but can also come into a struggle that damages the Earth in a big way.

Given the time of year, our landscape lends itself to bleak photographs. The things I captured were exactly that: bleak, almost post-apocalyptic looking. I went out just before the golden hour, so things would be somewhat orange, then filtered out some of the colors in the photographs simply by lowering the contrast. These features accentuate the subject matter at hand: garbage and interference. Things that were put in place by humans and then forgotten about, ways humans have thoughtlessly destroyed parts of nature, anything that humans did and that makes the Earth, as a whole, an uglier place to live.

The blog would likely be based in Tumblr. Tumblr not only enables freedom of design by allowing you to completely edit your blog’s source code, but also has a social-media backend allowing content to grow and spread more easily. I would like to put some time into the site’s design, and some time into finding interesting things to photograph. The site design aspect would probably take 3-5 hours, possibly more depending on how in-depth I want to go. There’s really no telling how long it would take to find enough satisfactory pictures, and it could become an ongoing project. Tumblr also makes it easy for users to share your content and submit their own content, something that would integrate well into this project.