Not My Finest Hour
Maybe it is just me, but when your fraternity goes to build a house for someone in need, and someone spends most of the time on their phone taking pictures of people, it isn’t a great look for them. And by them, I mean me. Given how you can’t build a whole house for someone in the span of a morning, it was particularly difficult to capture the different stages of constructing a house. Issues that I encountered were
:
the monotony of the build
the gloomy day and lack of natural color
wanting to contribute to the build but also take pictures
When I tried to pose some of my brothers, the pictures felt forced (see left)
When looking over the pictures in post, I felt that taking Sigma Nu’s colors to the forefront of our philanthropic mission would be a cool touch. I opted to make every photograph black and white but bring out the yellow in every picture. Black and Gold are the colors of our fraternity, so that continuing motif was really a focal point for this photo essay. Because I had Photoshop looking for yellow tones in my images, it ended up subtly bringing out the brown in the dirt of the worksite too, which kept my photos from not being too boring and blending together. While this was unintentional, I really ended up liking it, as you can see below circled in red.
In Photoshop, I really struggled with color changing, particularly on the photo of the saw, because of all the sawdust kicked up from the piece of siding we were cutting. It made the textures inconsistent when using the clone stamp to remove the brand name of the saw. It also made it difficult to change the accent color of the saw from burnt orange to gold. Additionally, given the limitations of Adobe Photoshop’s 3D engine, I was not able to flake sawdust onto the raised letters that I had affixed onto the saw.
I ended up returning to the house two weeks later to check the progress (and get a picture of the near-finished product). I can happily report that Habitat for Humanity and its wonderful volunteers have almost finished it. When we were working, the site manager told us it would be ready to move into during the middle of March, and it appears to be a long schedule! To whoever lives in the home that I poorly nailed siding to, sorry, but CONGRATS ON YOUR NEW HOME!
