I also went to a few other places within the few weeks with my friends and family. I went to the Botanic Gardens to actually get information for the module but I thought Hey! Botanic Garden is also a place that I really would visit from time to time because I am a nature person. I also visited the S.E.A Aquarium with my family just for fun.

After trying out the black and white edits, I figured that maybe I can try out colours for the project too. It was just to try out whether I can also portray the same feeling using colours since I am not really a black and white person, I realised I have a few difficulty when it comes to adjusting the contrast between the value. The trial and error for the black and white really help me learn a lot and observe the different tonal values better.

So I went to the Botanic gardens, it was a downpour before I reached there. Everything was pretty much wet but hey that is actually a good thing because that would mean the flowers would have water droplets on them which can actually make them prettier. I kind of forgot I went there on a Sunday so the number of people kind of eek me. This would mean that it is more difficult to take photos of the landscape without the people swarming everywhere. Morever the recent Pokemon craze isn’t helping either.

I tried to put together the process of the blooming of flowers since I was actually thinking about how as our life, or rather my life, proceeded on it felt like you as a person becomes a better person. This in turn shaping us into a more defined being different from everyone.

I did not want the colour to be too vibrant since I did not want the whole image to come off as too strong. I just wanted it to be subtle and the I have sort of decided that I want my photos to all have the washed out feeling. Somehow it just felt more calm and collected instead of the thing shouting out at you.

I did not edit too much for this photo but just mostly tweaked with the level of the images to bring down the contrast. It was somehow actually much more natural for me while doing colour as compared to black and white.

Somehow the black and white photos seem to make me depressing in a sense. The feeling of it being very solemn is there and I feel like I am not a person who can bring out a happy tone from a black and white image. It feels more natural to me in expressing my feelings in colours. Perhaps my animation background has something to do it since I am constantly told to try not to use muted colours.

I actually merged 3 photos together to give it more details instead of having something just in one place. For this photo I actually thought that it reminded me of being free of constraint. The cloud being “me” trying to control myself, the pink flowers indicating the problem growing and the yellow flower making it look like it exploded.

I actually had to change the colour of the whole image because all 3 of the images have very different tone. The flowers have a very yellow greenish tone to them while the image of the cloud is super bright and blue. I gave it a little more reddish tone because I thought that it has a more fluttering feeling to it, since warmer colours  give a happier feeling.

After trying out even more on double exposure and putting the images together. I thought that maybe I could actually use a different meaning of being free for my photos. They would still be from my memories but the different memories would represent a different type of freedom that actually means something to me.

Extra photos that I actually tried to edit :

Honestly speaking for two weeks, i just went to different places to shoot photographs of places or people that mean something to me, apart of my memories in a sense since my topic is about being free from my memories. What do i actually mean by being free from my memory, is that perhaps that is a particular incident or a place that stuck to me ever since because of something big that actually happened there or it just sort of changed me as a person on a whole.

So after trying to figure out exactly what I am trying to show through my photos after the first consultation/presentation during class, I thought of starting it simple with just shooting around my neighborhood. It was what I did for the first presentation but I was actually kind of lost still that time. However after the feedback, I realised actually what I wanted. I went around taking photos of the HDB flats, the trees, the temple, the playground and even the sky – even though the sky might not have been the same since last time but it was that particular spot that I would look up to the sky.

I thought was actually just testing out the different pictures and just putting them over each other.

The images I picked out was a photograph of the temple at the front of my block and a photo of my block behind the shades. At this point of time I still do not really have a specific idea of what photos I really wanted to overlay over each other. It is still just experimental.

I remember that among the two paragraphs, my black and white image was said to have a more define feeling of faded memory because of the softness the layers were over one another instead of the harsh one for the coloured one. So I tried also using the blending method that our lecture, Robert suggested. However, for this photo i did not use that method.

I changed the layer of the temple to screen and toggled with the opacity and fill. That was only managed to change a little of how I wanted the photo to look because the contrast between the tonal values were still pretty harsh among each other. I ended up pushing the darker greys into more of the mid-tone range to give it a more washed out feeling.

Also as seen in the photo to the left, the white of it is too harsh, eliminating too much of the information for the temple. I ended up trying the channel mixer and toggling with the different colour to bring out the different shades which in turn gave a more clearer view that it is a temple.

I went ahead and got a photo of my kindergarten, the first time I made so many friends.

The sky photo was supposed to be vertical but I decided to rotate it in a way to fit the image of the kindergarten. For this image I tried out the blending method, I kind of realised the method is more easier to use and control is the tonal value has a difference between the darkest and the lightest shade.

This photo was actually more difficult to edit because I realised the photo of the Kindergarten when taken then value were mostly all the same. It kind of affected the whole image when I tried to put them together. The leaves were really much darkest part of the whole image so I needed to balance out the contrast between the two images, if not it would have looked like a very harsh contour between them. Also, I will ended up over exposing the sky part since it was the brightest part.

This is what the photo would actually look like. I do not know why but somehow I feel like everything is too harsh and a lot of the details of the leaves around the kindergarten are lost.

I have always like double exposure photography but maybe I just haven’t the sense of style that I like yet. Maybe that is why I still feel kind of lost through the process.