Design Challenge 2: Run. Hide. Fight.

What aspect do I find fascinating about this world? For me, the influence of nature comes to mind. Nature is the foundation of the Earth - everything we create must accommodate for it, in both its physical and emotional forms. It is a powerful, beautiful force that contains as many mysteries as the universe.

To that extent, I have made a simple observation. The human eye can perceive many more shades of green than any other color in the visible spectrum. It is a means of survival through the reality of nature - to give humans a fighting chance. So, I wanted to capture a sample of these countless shades of green.

Ideation

I find it natural to associate the words "nature" and "green" with plant life. The subject of "plants" seemed like a reasonable approach for this challenge, as every plant has a unique shade of green.

I created a Pinterest board around this topic where I browsed through pins of plants and shades of green. Mostly I found full portraits of plants. It appeared that these images were being used more for sales purposes instead of bringing in an artistic perspective. For the latter case, I found some ornate plant textures that clearly captured nature's intricate details. I also found some color palettes of a few shades of green. The descriptions were limited to a single word, which was reasonable for describing a square of solid color.

From what I had gathered, nobody has yet attempted to take photos of plants and give artistic attention to the unique shades of green each subject presented. So I decided to take the approach of taking 40+ different photos of plants and give my impression of the shade of green that I perceived was unique to the plant itself.

I used my smartphone with a manual camera app to take all my photos. I found it easy to adjust ISO, shutter speed, and focus using the app.

As my intention was to bring attention to the shades of green in each plant subject, I shot against a white background for most of my photos. Since a few subjects were found outside, I limited the amount of colors shown to three, meaning that the colors of flowers were kept while I took the saturation out of the outlying colors found in the environment. I took photos of both indoor and outdoor plants for a variety of shades.

Since I wanted to give descriptions of each unique shade of green, the final photo book that I have compiled consists mostly of one plant per page. I had also collaged plants side by side into my own green color palettes.

Photo Book: Nature's Shades of Green