“Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.” Andy Dufresne, The Shawshank Redemption.

I decided to have a go at the Quotography challenge on Nick Exposed. Each participant submitted three quotations. Then they were jumbled up and we were sent three from someone else with the challenge to photograph them. I can’t claim a great deal of success. I only did two of the quotations I received and one of those is best described as developmental. This is the best.
The problem with this quote was that ‘Hope’ as an abstract concept can be represented by almost anything. My team mate, my eleven year-old daughter, and I agreed that we didn’t want to photograph a flower, or a landscape, or any other random thing simply because its beauty might suggest hope. We wanted to represent Hope more specifically. My daughter, a fan of myths and legends, suggested the story of Pandora’s box, in which hope is sometimes described as a white butterfly. I liked the idea of using a living thing to represent hope as it tied in with the last part of the quote, and having it emerge from incarceration in the box also suggested the movie from which the quote came. Luckily, I owned a suitable box and I had some shots of a white butterfly taken last year. We lit the box from within by placing my iPhone inside with the torch app enabled. In a dark room, with tripod and self-timer, I photographed the box, and then enhanced the light effect and added the butterfly and a texture in Photoshop.