Fifth Symphony

I was hiking in a local state park called Balboa Park in San Diego, California and I had just finished hiking one of the easier trails and was making my way off the trail when I came across a bunch trash and scattered records on a bridge that leads from one set of hiking trails to more advanced and deeper hiking trails, and amongst the records was Beethoven's Symphony No. 5. Being that I'm a huge Beethoven fan I felt like I had to capture this image, I thought how lucky am I to have come across such an amazing image. My initial thought was why would someone break a Beethoven record and leave it here like that. I’ve always loved classical music and have been lucky enough to attend a number of orchestral performances so my inspiration for capturing this image was partly inspired by wanting to capture a great scene and because I love classical music and this cover was lain across as if it were waiting to be photographed. When I take a photograph, I try to find things that you wouldn’t come across every day or that people would ordinarily miss.

I took out my iPhone 7, my mini tripod and phone mount(the phone mount holds the camera in place and allows for no camera shake) which I use for all of my photos as it is the only camera that I have at the moment, I set up my camera so that the aperture was f1/8, the iso was 20, I used a digital zoom of 2.03, I did not use any flash due to the already high amount of sunlight. Once I attached my telephoto lens, which is designed specifically for mobile phones, I zoomed to a focal length of 3.99 mm and got down low and took several images of the scene, after getting about 5 or 6 good shots, I chose the one that looked the best and once I had a shot that I was satisfied with, I immediately knew that I wanted it to be seen as if it were a part of a vivid dream because I wanted to convey the feeling that you feel when listening to Beethoven’s music, well classical music in general.

I edited the photo in Photoshop Express (a mobile version of Photoshop). I used an HDR filter followed by a Black & White filter because I wanted the image to have an added sense of depth and I wanted the black and white to enhance the dream like feeling of the image, and finally; I used a blur effect to give the photo a dream like quality. I duplicated the image and used different filters, just to see if any would look better than the black and white did; and there was a one that I used a sepia filter on and a bokeh effect, this editing produced an interesting look but I decided that the black & white still worked the best.

Once those steps were completed, I added my watermark and cropped the photo so that it was the correct size for my Instagram page. There are other images from that scene, which include other broken records and record covers; however, this one stood out to me. One thing that I want people to get from this photo is that you can find some truly amazing things if you can see through the messy bits and instead try to look for the magic in all things. Music is everywhere and this image. I hope, as seen through the eyes of a viewer can relay that message and come across exactly as I intended it to.