Freestyle Academy proudly presents

Antiquated: A Junior Conceptual Transport Project by Mahika Gupta (2017)

The goal of this assignment was to take a shallow depth of field shot of a non-motorized object with wheels from an unusual or interesting angle. My photo is of the gears on a bike. In order to achieve this angle, I laid a bike on the ground and tried experimenting with leading lines and different points of view to obtain the most interesting angle. I chose a bike because even though it is arguably the most common form of non-motorized transport, there are so many little things that make a bike work and I wanted to try and capture that. This picture specifically reminded me of an antique clock. Very few people still own antique clocks, and if they do it sits in a musty collector’s cabinet rather than above a fireplace, where a new, modern timepiece ticks away. Much like the antique clock, bicycles are becoming more of a collector’s item. They often sit in a garage, covered by the broken promises made by their owners to use them. This once beloved form of transportation has become increasingly more irrelevant for day to day transport due to the widespread use of motorized vehicles. This photo represents the past and present of the bike, once beautiful and important but captured in an old, sepia filter.

I enhanced my photo using Photoshop to make the gear look more outdated. To do this, I made a selection of just the gold part of the gear and made it slightly brighter than everything else. I also experimented more with content aware fill, a tool we just learned, to clear up some distracting red spots on the gear. From there I went on to adding an orange-brown colored photo filter to mimic the sepia filter, which is often used to make things look older. After that, I played around with the hue and saturation, which left me with this photo as my final product.
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