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Critical appraisal, The Environment Johanna Rosenlew For the first task for the Environment unit I have chosen to deconstruct Robert Adams photograph 'On Signal Hill, Overlooking Long Beach, California' , taken 1983. I failed to find two trees, so in order to produce the best replica I used one small tree overlooking the Medway River and parts of Chatham. I photographed it just before the sunset, when the fog had appeared over the river. I used an aperture of 16, to try to copy the depth-of-field. I am happy with the result because I think I did my best trying to replicate the original picture. The only thing I would like to change is the light in the picture, I think the ground is all to bright. For my own conceptual approach for the environment unit I have chosen to portray the polluted sea. I got the idea by watching the tidal in the Medway River. Because we don’t have any tidal in Finland, I have always found the phenomena as very interesting. But I was really chocked when I saw what the sinking water revealed in the grey mud- waste. It looked like people had used the sea as a garbage bin. My whole life I have lived next to the dirtiest sea in the world, but I have also grown up learning how to take care of it, so seeing the dirty bottom made me angry. I have always seen the sea as the most pure form of nature, as a never-ending blue escape from man-maid environment. For this unit I wanted to portray it as ugly, dirty and destroyed.
