Sympathy Through Playing Games: A Junior Design Student Conceptual Project by Quinn Beckstead (2015)

In my photo there is a tree that is split in the middle. On one of the trunks there is a bright yellow bow and on the other is an American flag. The photo has two borders- on the top, the trees branches create a border that leads the eyes to the bow and flag and on the bottom there are rocks that do the same thing. The lighting of the photo is darker because it's supposed to make the bright bow really pop. The reason I had the bow and the flag in separate areas is because I wanted to use rule of thirds and because I didn't want a lot of empty space. The first thing I did to my photo was crop the sides, so the rule of thirds would work better and added vignettes to direct the audience's eyes. Once in Photoshop, I needed to bump up the exposure on the photo. After that, I made some selections. I selected both the bow and the flag, my two subjects of the photo. With the bow, I increased the exposure and brought out the yellows. Regarding the flag, I deepened the colors in saturation, so they were less vibrant, but still bold. The final thing that I did to edit my photo was add a crosshatching filter to the flag. By adding the crosshatching, it added more texture making it seem more rugged and gritty.

When coming up for an idea for my concept statement, I came to the conclusion that the best way to go about the playing games aspect was war games. I then thought about the yellow ribbon around a tree to signify someone missing. I made the bow in my photo especially bright and eye catching, not only to signify that someone was gone, but that it's something we need to feel sympathy for and would also stand for hope that people haven't given up searching. I didn't want there to be the mistake that this was patriotic in a 4th of July way. It is supposed to represent the war games, how difficult they really are and how there's an element of mystery there, that you can't really know everything that happened.