To begin my project I captured a series of photographs whilst visiting home, surrounded by beach and castle ruins imagery. Whilst photographing, I narrowed my focus onto the composition attempting to take pictures based on angles and viewpoints. Afterwards I converted all of my images into black and white in order to not get distracted by colours.
After reviewing my digital photos, I narrowed my options down to a final three, which I imported into Adobe Photoshop.
Final Result
My initial concept for this project was to have the castle ruins be illuminated as a central focus, exaggerating the height and proportions in order to create a slightly threatening effect. I also enjoyed the narrative of a barren landscape, so involving the bare beach as the castle’s surroundings with an identical second castle is something I wanted to do in order to achieve a sense of uncertainty within the composition. Whilst visual editing my concept, I realised that I could warp and reshape images to work in my favour, so I began with stretching out the castle to appear taller and more looming in an attempt to make the viewer feel vulnerable. The angle at which the castle sits appears as though it is being viewed from down below, so I juxtaposed this with the straight-on viewing angle of the beach background in order to further illustrate the uncertain and impossible atmosphere. For the iron fence and stone foreground, I rotated this image in order to create an interesting contrast against the diagonal angle of the fence and hill that the castle sits on. I also experimented with the brightness of the three images, with the foreground images being darker than the background images therefore creating more depth. To reflect on my work, I enjoy the contrasts between nature and architecture that I have created, but despite this I feel as though I did not experiment with textures enough. If I was to work further on this project, I might try involving some softer textures to see how they work within the piece.