Nature in the Neighborhood - Marcos Kivett

For my assignment, I wanted to focus on the environment directly around my house. I shot my photos directly in our parking lot and found a surprising amount of nature. Lots of grass, moss, and brambles surround our lot and unfortunately it is not black berry season. The focus of my photoshoot was plants frozen in time. Luckily for me, we got two mornings of frost over this weekend, allowing me to document plants crusted with frost. Some challenges I faced while shooting were my camera's ideal focus range, and color pop. When shooting, I was trying to capture the complexity of the frost and how it covered and clung to the plant, but finding the ideal focus range was a challenge. The photos would either turn out far too blurry in an attempt to focus only on the surface layer of the frost or the plant would be fully in focus but none of the frost layer would show up on the camera. To combat this, I tried adjusting the exposure level to rely on the reflectiveness of the frost layer to create a more vivid image of the frost. Another issue I came across was color pop. In this season, most of the plant life around my house has died back and thus creating a sea of white and brown. However, when I did find a few green plants still, they stood out to an extreme degree. To help deal with this problem, I tried adjusting the shutter speed, in an attempt to minimize the amount of light the camera would capture. What surprised me about this shoot was the amount of plants that were still alive and healthy during this time of year. It really speaks to the resilience of nature around us and it is an honor to get to document them.