Ducks @ Oregon - University of Oregon

Work in Progress

Leah C.

November 9, 2009 - 1:00 AM

In my Digital Imaging course, our second project was about taking photos of an object, blowing them out of proportion, and incorporating it into a natural looking environment. A basic example of this can be giant preying mantis chasing football players at Autzen. My actual idea involved combining a close up photo of a white carnation and working with the petals to form a sort of dress. This project was more of a self study project in order to hone our Photoshop skills, as well as develop ideas or stories into our work.

I chose myself as the model, simply because I was there. I asked a friend to help photograph me and after about 20 or so shots, I chose one in which I looked delicate and peaceful. I wanted something that would match the emotion of how I viewed the photo of the white carnation. The flower just seemed very pure and fragile, and I wanted to incorporate all the ideas together. For the most part of the project, I did a lot of cutting and pasting for the creation of the flower dress. There was no particular design I had in mind, just as long as it covered the body and looked alright. I also adjusted the lighting and color a little bit, and even blended in a texture of a tree trunk into the walls and stairs of the photo. This helped complete the organic feel in my image, as well as contrasting the two textures in the photograph.

This project was due on the same day as one of my midterms and I scrambled to try to catch up. So far I feel like the image is incomplete. I just think there is a lot more that can be done. I want to make the dress blend in and look more real, but when I turned the project in last week and received a lot of positive feedback during the critique in class, many of my classmates told me it looked good, and saw nothing that needed to be changed. I guess my expectation for what the final piece should look like is really high. I'm not sure what more I should do, but I just feel like if I had more time to work on this, I would finally be satisfied and maybe figure out exactly what I need to do. Luckily I can still resubmit an updated version of my project before the end of the term. I really want to prove to myself that I can do this!