For some reason, I have been really interested in photographing trash cans lately. I am not simply taking photos of them, but am manipulating the style and colors too. I am also starting to learn some of the very basics of photo editing, as I am not a professional photographer nor do I have extensive experience in photography. It is more a new hobby for me than anything.
After I had taken what I thought were some really cool trash can photos, I had an idea to do a full series of trash can photography art. The first thing I needed to do was drive around and take photos of different trash cans around the city. I asked my wife to drive so I could hop out of the car every time I saw a trash can I liked. While I am not going to share every trash can I photographed, I do want to share one of my favorite trash cans, and the series of edits I made to get to the final product.
Above is the original photo I took. I use my cell phone for all of my photography, a Xiaomi Mi9. I used the pro settings in the stock camera app.
My first goal was to crop the photo and make it black and white, as I love the black and white aesthetic. However, I wanted to keep the blue color of the trash cans, and also the blue sky, to draw the viewer's attention to the main subject: the trash cans.
In order to get from the first to the second photo, I used a photo editing application on my phone. The app I use has some very robust features and allows me to make many different black and white styles, as well as allows me to enhance some of the features of the photo. I first cropped the photo to the size I wanted. Next, I made the photo black and white, and isolated everything blue in the photo. I then had to manually clean up some of the blue parts because the AI kept a few things in color that I wanted to be black and white. After that, I applied an HDR filter to sharpen the objects. I then added a vignette filter, and finally put my watermark in the corner.
While I was quite proud of how this edit turned out, I wasn't yet finished with the project. I wanted to see what would happen if I changed the color of the trash cans and sky. I decided to make 10 different color versions, with each color being equidistant from the prior one. Below you will see the result of the 9 other color edits.
My favorite part of these edits is how the color of the sky matches the color of the trash cans. Also, I love how the colors seem just a little bit unnatural and out of place.
The last part of the project was to put everything together in an animated GIF. I used a mobile GIF animation application to put all of the photos together in a loop. There are 10 total pictures that make up the GIF, and the GIF has a framerate of 10f/s (if I understood the settings of the app correctly). The finishing touch was to add a glitch effect.
While this project was by no means professional, I had a lot of fun being creative with it and learned a lot too. I plan on continuing my trash can series for as long as it holds my attention. If some other subject matter catches my fancy, I may just have to start a similar project with it.
Thanks for reading, and I would love to know what you think! As I am still a beginner with photography, any tips and advice are greatly appreciated.