My name is Samantha Barreto. I am a photography graduate from The Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
In each of my photographs, I try to present a scene the way I felt it, and not necessarily just the way I saw it. This is because, to me, the most important challenge in making a photograph is to elicit an emotional response in the viewer. I feel comfortable in adjusting colors, contrast, and other aspects of a photograph in order to strengthen the emotional message a photograph should convey (especially in the digital age, which offers the photographer many possibilities that simply did not exist before). And while it is important to me that the results still very much resemble reality, I do not claim to be a photo journalist that captures reality in its purest sense. Just like a painter, a photographer should be allowed to make a piece of art rather than just take a photograph.
The focus of my photographs is how I see the world. In my eyes, the sight of a spectacular sunset, a pristine waterfall, or a vast and deserted landscape are the things that allow us to escape from our daily routine and to start dreaming, also the simple moments when walking a street you notice a brief moment in someone’s life.
