seven heavenly virtues

The original seven heavenly virtues—chastity, faith, good works, concord, sobriety, patience, and humility—were intended by Christian poet Prudentius to oppose the seven deadly sins at the time—lust, idolatry, greed, discord, indulgence, wrath, and pride. However, Pope Gregory revised the list of sins, which in turn adjusted the virtues to chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, kindness, patience, and humility to properly counteract the new set of sins. These virtues are said to point a Christian toward God and away from a disposition to sin.

Inspired by the biblical story of Adam & Eve, I decided to use my hands and apples as the subject matter. I also decided to keep the compositions clean and minimal, challenging myself to portray each of the virtues in as few elements as possible. I used digital photography and Adobe Photoshop to create the final compositions featured on each spread. The finished product is a 11 x 14 tabloid, organized using Adobe InDesign, printed through The Newspaper Club on 55GSM paper. Visit my dropmark to view my process and inspiration for this project.

The cover, featuring a hand sans apple.

Most of the compositions in the tabloid follow the same formula; The final photographed composition, background information on each virtue, and a few process pictures.

All final compositions were created using digitally photographed elements which were then edited in Photoshop.

As seen in the process pictures, I created mock up compositions in Adobe Illustrator before proceeding to photographing.

This composition was the most difficult for me digitally, as I had to include a flat surface to set the apples on. This introduced some odd shadows and other challenges when editing the images.

My favorite spread, which also happened to be the most messy to photograph.

The final photograph for kindness was the most challenging for me overall. I had to come up with a way to make the apples look like they were being held up by another hand which was edited in.