Okay, there is a reason for the repeated photo of this dirty plant. Today for print making class, we were told to meet up at a park by the river downtown, so I hitched a ride to meet my classmates there. Our professor suggested wandering down the bamboo trail for our project to get some ideas. We were to be taking photos and doing drawings. I found myself taking a bajillion pictures of the bamboo, but then I kept getting drawn to plants like this one with large, long linear leaves that were vibrantly green. I found this giant plant along the river bank. The radial outreaching pattern automatically made me want to take a few photos of it. There is mud caked in the leaves, filling the cracks. I think this is the most inspiring photo I took today. The reason for the mud deposits in the leaves is because the river floods so high that mud just gets on all of the flora down by the river, up to about 20 meters or so, I heard. This plant was about 5 meters above the water. When I got home, I was messing with the photos and decided to make copies of this one to play with. I went all crazy with trying extreme tinting. I put this to the maximum level of warmth on my picture editor about three and a half times to get this scarlet color. I also messed with the saturation and put the tint towards purple just a bit. Oh, and I bumped up the contrast to dramaticize the cracks in the dried mud.

For this second photo, I just wanted to see how the plant would look in black and white but with just the slightest hint of color left and I gave it a bit of warmth as well.

For this last photo, I wanted to go opposite from the red so I put the temperature to cool 3 and a half times and tinted it more towards green. Oh, and I decreased the contrast slightly and dimmed the brightness. I just wanted to explore the different possibilities generated by this seemingly simple photo of a riverbank “weed”. It’s amazing the lines and textures and patterns that nature has hidden within the most unexpected of places. Who knew I would find this gem on a muddy riverbank? 🙂