SP.747 Creative Imaging Final ProjectArlis Reynolds17 May 2007To me, good art is a controlled representation of real and natural images, wherethe adjustments and inspiration are often derived from experiments andaccidents. I generally dislike the idea of Photoshop, but find it interesting to seethe effect of the various tools on an authentic image. I call these effects“accidents” because I don’t use those tools with expectations, but rather seewhat happens and decide if the result contributes or not to the goal of my image.Always, the textures and colors in an image should be natural. Nothing newshould be created – because anything created would be false in the context ofthat image – but anything can be eliminated.As a photographer, my motivations are to find and create photographs that tell astory about my life now, and from which I can remember that story in the future.My photographs are not meant only as a scrapbook of friends, events, andfactual details, but as a preservation of feelings, emotions and critical momentsor stages in my life.My goal with this project was to create an image using real photographs thatvisually display how I feel about my life now, at a major turning point betweencollege and life undefined.Original ImagesThe original pictures used in this project are photographs from an earlierassignment on self portraits. They were taken in the SP.747 classroom, using aprojector screen for a background and two spotlights for my face and to preventshadows on the background. I used a Pentax ZX-50 with Ilford ISO 400 B&Wfilm. Each digital portrait is a copy of the original film negative, scanned usingthe Leafscan 45.I wanted to use these imagestogether in a larger project becauseeach stood out of the original bunchfor a special reason. The first is abeautiful silhouette which carries avery strong mood with such littledetail. The second and thirdimages immediately caught myattention because I can see my parents in them, in physical features as well ascharacter.The first image is almost all in shadow except a sliver of my face. I like thisimage because the shadows contribute to the universality of the image. Theshadows take away enough personal detail that this image can represent anywoman, but leave a sliver of a face to emphasize that this is a personal story.The second image is very different, and I consider it the most powerful in theseries because of the strong connection with the camera. Not only is there directeye-contact, but the whole body is oriented to face the viewer, and in acomfortable position to suggest that this is not a fleeting glance.The last image was extremely moving to me personally because I can see mymother's characteristics so strongly in my own face. It is a softer and moreserious picture, but still represents her beauty and strength.Techniques and Motivations for Photoshop EditingThe “Notan” effect on each image was interesting,but took away the softer details in the image. Iwanted to bring some detail back to the notan byadding a third color with some of the photo’s originaltexture. To do this, I created a combinationbetween the “notan” and the original picture.I did this in three steps creating unique white areas using a color gradient tool atvarious tolerances, leaving some areas untouched, and adjusting each image’sbrightness and contrast to get solid black, white and medium gray tones.I used the "Magic Wand" tool to identify fine color gradients in the image. Iconsider these features "natural" to the image because that data is alreadyembedded in the file, either due to textures or lighting in the original photographor from scratches or fading of the negative. It's not always obvious whatselections the wand will make, especially in grayscale, and the sizes of thoseselections are not always complementary to the image.I used the tolerance adjustment on each image to control the scope and size ofthe wand’s selections, so that they contributed to an outline of each image butleft in some of the softer details.I started erasing these selected areas as an experiment, but liked the results.Missing segments of the image give each a hard edge while allowing some of thesofter edges to remain. It also gives the image an feeling o f incompleteness:either an unfinished look, like a drawing that hasn't yet been colored in; or anaged look, like a painting with pieces of the image crumbling away.This dichotomy of ways to view the image is an important translation of the majortheme in this project. At this time in a young woman's life, there are moments ofboth beauty and emptiness. The woman's character is incomplete, but can beconfronted in either of two ways: her character is growing and each black area isfree space to be filled in with personal growth, or a life is falling apart and theempty spaces continue to expand taking pieces of a life with it. These optionsare two extremes but really represent the state of a young woman at the dawn oflife as an adult; it is very much the situation in which I found myself uponcompletion of my undergraduate degree and entering my first year as a collegegraduate.For the first time, the unwritten pages of my life had no recommended topics.Life through college is less a blank slate than a suggested path for success: I hadcompleted high school, played sports, learned an instrument, completed college,and made a circle of very important and close friends. Life after college wasanything I wanted to make it, an offering both exciting and terrifying in itspossibilities.Arrangement of the ImagesThe images sit side by side in a very structured and linear arrangement, surelyreflecting my preference for order, but also enhancing the focus on the imagesalone. The images have a wide lateral spacing so that each encompasses itsown space. I found that when they were too close, the center image took muchof the attention since it is in the middle and has that direct eye-contact with thecamera. Separating the images forces the viewer to look at each imageindividually.Continuity between the images comes from their similar subject and style, andblending into the white background. It is clear that each image represents thesame subject even though there is little detail in the facial features.I also had to size and crop each image so that the aspect ratio of each matched,contributing to the ordered feeling of the arrangement, and so that size of thefigure in each image was comparable to