When choosing the painting styles I would use for these two photos, I wanted to do a contrast of a fantastical environment vs. something realistic. While Ripples shows something a bit more clean-cut, kind of what we might envision when imagining a beautiful environment, Undergrowth is meant to be a slightly more realistic depiction, in the sense that in especially harsh "jungle" environments, there is a reason why people have to carry around something like a machete to hack through the undergrowth. The choice for the juxtaposition of these two photos was largely inspired by my experience in Uganda last summer. While I was lucky enough to only muddy up my shoes while, the forest itself was not some clean-cut fantasy land. However, like Undergrowth, this did not make the rainforest inherently disgusting.
Much like the previous two images, Willful Ignorance and Century-Long Warning are meant to juxtapose each other, but in this case, they are about Global Warming. Willful Ignorance is essentially what most deniers of climate change want to pretend is their reality, just a comforting expanse of land with a multitude of wildlife. Century-Long Warning, named to reference the fact that knowledge of Global Warming was available to us for nearly a century, is meant to be the reality that so many of us are ignoring. Yes, the trees and farmland are still there, but if we do not do something, they will be gone. While I doubt this event will destroy all life on the planet, humans will still be responsible for a mass extinction which will likely include our own species.
While not as serious a contrast as the previous two sets of images, these two arboreal photos are meant to contrast each other not as a reality vs delusion/expectation, but rather as simply two different types of reality which are a bit easier to digest. The bare Lone Arbor is simply one of the first trees of autumn to lose its leaves, whereas the evergreen tree in the background in Towards the Sky is going to remain green while the trees in the foreground still have yet to lose their leaves. So far, both of these were some of the easiest to take as I did not have to worry about manmade elements making their way into the photo.
Similarly to the arboreal set of pictures, both of these were easy to take because of the lack of manmade objects forcing me to adjust the angle of the camera. Of the two, Rodent's Eye View was one I was sure I was going to take for this assignment, at least I was sure that I was going to take one photo from that particular angle. With Moldy Rock, I would have changed the angle so that the rock itself would be in the direct foreground, but the rest of the image would include the tall grass so that it could be viewed as if the grass was a forest.
Despite the fact that Domesticated Farmland and De-loggerized Zone both brought challenges with the fact that there was manmade stuff nearby both of them, they were the two images I put the absolute least thought into taking. While I'd say De-loggerized zone symbolizes a sort of boundary between humans and nature, Domesticated Farmland is a piece I consider to be incredibly generic and I unfortunately have failed to find much in terms of any actual meaning from the photo. At the very least, I do find it decent to look at.