Not as it Seems

 I realized that social media has a big impact on how people view themselves. 

This photo is titled "Not as it Seems".

The apple in the foreground is real, while the one in the background is merely a reflection in a mirror. The real apple looks bright, appetizing, and (nearly) perfect, however, the reflected image represents “reality”. It’s duller in color, and has a huge browning bite. The apple was not pretty to begin with, so I manipulated it in Adobe Lightroom. For the first apple, I brightened it up, added luminance, and spot healed the blemishes. Surprisingly, I didn’t need to edit the reflection at all! That is exactly what the apple looked like in my camera. The browning of the bite was also completely accidental. Mr. O’Neil, my AP Photo teacher, lent me a tripod to use for this image, and I was struggling to set it up. In all, it took about twenty minutes for the tripod to cooperate. The scene was set up, but I couldn’t immediately snap a photo because the tripod was a necessity. I needed a long exposure because of the weird lighting in the library office at school. If I took the picture while just holding the camera, the picture would come out extremely overexposed and blurry. Unexpectedly, I learned something new! I was aware of the overexposure issue, but never knew how to fix it until I asked Mr. O’Neil for help.

This is one of my favorite photographs that I've ever taken. (: