Last summer I had the incredible opportunity to travel to Paris with my family. It was an incredible vacation, including shopping, amazing food, and meaningful family bonding.
My one disappointment – we travelled there mere weeks after the Parisian government removed the famous love locks from the Pont de Arts bridge. While I know the government was forced to do this due to the impending collapse of the bridge, it made me so sad to miss seeing the beautiful stories of love preserved in those locks.
It’s always been a dream of mine to attach a lock of my own to a bridge. Maybe not one in Paris, but in a location meaningful to me and my partner. The sentiment of romance – that no one can remove your iron lock, truly resonates with me.
*sigh*
But here I was, venturing to Paris for the first time ever in June 2015, while the locks had been removed in May. I was still hopeful that not ALL of the locks had been removed, and luckily enough a few barricades on the shore of the Seine remained covered in love locks. I convinced my family to stop for a while just so I could read a few anniversaries and take some decent pictures. The photos I took that day are incredibly meaningful to me because I didn’t know at the time whether or not they too would be removed… And I think objects symbolizing love should never be destroyed.
Later, when an assignment in one of my graphic design courses reminded me, I decided that these images would be the perfect ones to edit into a color harmony. I figured since the locks so obviously represented love to me, I could easily edit the color scheme to represent warm hues only.
Using Photoshop, I individually selected each lock and made it a different warm color – yellow, orange, pinks, and reds. I also applied an overall warming filter so that even the un-edited portions would look a little pinker. It was a valuable lesson in selection and color editing that I will never forget, and I am very proud of the final result.
Before
