Landscape Changing Processes and Digital Media

My thought of Louisiana landscape in the relationship between the infrastructure and the ecology is the adaptation of nature. Landscape is changed by natural process. The idea started from the relationship between infrastructure and the ecology as how they blend in and live together. To investigate this narrative,  I had a chance to explore the changes of landscape  through the process of digital media.

I use the I-10 bridge to represent my idea of natural change from time to time as I see the road as the infrastructure that brings the development into the city. This always makes changes in landscape. As I travel around the city, I often see the roads are being expanded.

The idea started from the natural succession process and how adaptation makes the nature and man-made structures blend together as an evolution.

Each photo in the triptych represents the landscape in 3 different moods; pure, invaded and equilibrium. My approach is viewing landscape as nature. It was pure until the man-made structure came in and invade the space. Then, the landscape adjusted itself to the equilibrium state, which human and nature can live in symbiosis.

Techniques

I started with the photo of the I-10 bridge and did the digital collage and triptych in Adobe Photoshop.

Original image

I used overlapping layers to create the different moods of the photos. The first part of the triptych represents the past, when the nature was pure. I made the fog effect by using brush tool with different sizes and opacity. I adjusted the opacity of layers and put the fog layer on top of it to make the bridge disappeared from the frame. Then, I collaged the planting on top of these layers to represent the pure nature with natural succession.

First image and visual transformation

In the second part of the triptych, I overlapped the layers with motion blur filter to create the shaking effect to represent the invading nature and adjusted the color of the photo with colored layer.

Second image and visual transformation

Last image and visual transformation

In the last photo, I cropped the bridge structure out from the background and collaged the foreground and background layers to represent how the adaptation make the nature blended together with the man-made structure.

Lastly, I made a connection between each photo by using a single line to draw the outline of top of the bridge and annotate the relationship in each image, as well as create the continuity of changes from time to time.