Through out my pictures I use many pictures from around the world, trying to convey my love for traveling and escaping reality. I began with adding a picture of the sky that I took from a plane perspective showing the actual travel. I continued with a picture of the sunset that I took last summer. I believe every time I see a beautiful sky it just gives me hope for life, no matter how I'm feeling at that moment. It gives me a short escape. The next picture I used was a picture that I took in Buenos Aires, Argentina, my parents home town. I travel there often and believed that it was a large part of my life, along with fitting the theme of escape. Following with a picture of Dominican Republic, I added palm trees to my portrait, representing my love for tropical weather. When I went to Punta Cana last year for spring break, I had no worries and I was able to just get away from reality. Lastly, I used a picture of smoke. Smoke is something I always felt was very artistic. The way it moves and the designs it creates in the air to me is mesmerizing. I believe all these pictures give you a way, or at least me personally, to "escape reality" even if it is just for a little while.
"Drowning" containing "Look Inside" and "Can't Breathe"
I was sitting in bed trying to think of what I could possibly do for the double exposure. I had a few ideas but I didn't have the settings I needed to achieve them accessible to me. As I was looking around my room I saw a drawing I made last year in art class. Although it was a simple drawing, it had a lot of meaning due to the words written on it and the way they were "suffocating" or "drowning" the girl by covering her mouth and nose. I kept looking at it and realized the words overlapping her face could be recreated using real photos, which is how this double exposure came to be.
Looking at these two portraits, I can notice the significant growth I've made using photoshop and in planning out my photographs. You can tell that the first one was an experiment; I really had no clue what I was getting into when I began, I just kind of threw pictures on top of each other. The second picture makes it clear that it was carefully planned out the way the words fit with the shape of my face. Another significant difference between the two is that in "Escape the Realms of Reality", all the layers are showing in all parts of the pictures. I didn't specifically pick a certain part of a certain image to go in a specific place, I just layered them all up without making any adjustments. In "Drowning", the second layer is only prominent over my face, where it was meant to go, as opposed to over the whole image entirely. Overall, I believe that over the course of the trimester, I have really begun to carefully think and plan out my photos to create a unified composition with a deeper meaning than just "an image".