Reflection

Artist Statement

For this assignment we had the task to either take a picture using magnification, or take a photo that was a reflection. I chose to do the reflection piece. For my subject I used myself because with quarantine and everything it makes it extremely hard to take photos of other people. I took this at a dock in brunswick right off the androscoggin river. I took this with my phone and put it into lightroom and change the colors around a little bit and turned down the exposure to not make everything so bright. I chose to create this image because when I saw my reflection in my car it gave off a weird texture, as in like a funhouse mirror. I decided to use that as my photo because I thought it was cool and different and not many people look to have their reflection photograph to be off a car.

For the compositional techniques used, I used Formal balance and sharp focus. For the formal balance I am right smack in the middle of the image and I think im pretty symmetrical and that would lead to formal balance. For the sharp focus I focused on the car. The car itself is very sharp focus and I didn't choose to blur anything out and kept it the way it was. The soft focus happening in the image is just how the texture came out when taking the image. So when I was first thinking of this image I really wanted to take a photo of me and my reflection at the water. I tried it and It wasn't coming out like how I'd hoped. It was more of a shadow than a reflection. Once I realized it was a shadow I walked back to my car and was a little sad and stressed because I needed a new idea and saw my reflection in the car next to me and took some photos and couldn't think of anything better.

The story of this photo was when I was down at the river trying to take a picture of my reflection in the water, which didn't work. So I walked back to my car and was stressed that I needed a new idea and then I saw myself in the car next to me and I thought, "Hey, that's a reflection photo." and started taking pictures of myself in a parking lot. This relates to my life because its me. Dumb and stupid, yet really funny. I thought this photo wasn't the best but I thought it was funny the way I came to take it. I never use pictures of myself, especially when I'm by myself because it looks weird and unpleasing, but this time I had to and I was laughing the entire time. The only thing I would change about this image is that I wish it was more creatively done and done with someone else as my subject.

-Matthew Kempf.