Glass/Transparency

Artist Statement

To capture the original, unedited image, I simply turned the camera toward myself and took a photo close to my face. I then cropped the image so that the focus was exclusively on my eyes. The quality of the photo was quite bad, and I had trouble managing that as I went to edit it, but as I transferred the image to my laptop I changed the size and increased the pixels per inch of the image. I wanted the focus of the image to be the photo editing, and the original image was quite simple. There was no angle up or down or side view, the image only consisted of my eyes and a bit of the rest of my face. I intended to have a very formal balance for the image in order to show the photo editing more in the final product (and also to make that photo editing easier to complete).

The photo editing was harder than I originally thought it would be: I looked up tutorials on how to create a glass-like effect in photoshop over the photograph I put under the layer mask for the eyes, but it proved to be more difficult than I assumed. Despite following instructions, I struggled to achieve the desired effect. I attempted to resort to using the dodge tool over the images under the layer mask, but due to the image itself as well as my lack of understanding of the lighting in the image it failed to look very realistic. I used the brush tool to try and add depth with shadows as well, and attempted to blur the edges with the blur tool. I adjusted the saturation of the image but increased the saturation of certain colors (light blue) more than others to further emphasize the eyes. If I had to go back to add editing, I would adjust the noise of one image to match the other, which I didn’t realize at first, as well as fix up the ‘glass’ effect.

The image connects to my personal concentration, representing metaphors as a literary device. My inspiration for this image came from the phrase “the eyes are the window to the soul”—I intended to connect whichever image I edited in to some element of one’s personality or desires. For this, I chose a photo I took from the window of a plane while above the clouds to represent a love of travel, hope to achieve one’s dreams, and imagination. I intended for the image to have a kind of surreal atmosphere that I would achieve through the photo editing process in order to reflect the metaphor the image was inspired by. I tried to address the concept of transparency as an intellectual idea by representing it physically in my image, and thought it fit nicely with this part of my personal concentration.