Family Dynamics

Artist Statement

For this assignment I had the task to take a photo that represented family dynamics. For this photo I chose to take a picture of a fish. At first glance you might not know why I took this picture because it has almost nothing to do with family, but to me it does. I chose to take this image because my family is a big fishing family, and to get out around the stress of Covid-19, is overall just a good thing. I edited this by changing the colors on the fish just a little bit so that the colors would pop just a little bit more and edited the background to make it a little more colorful.

The techniques i used in this image would be angle down and selective focus. I angled down because it was just a natural position for me and the selective focus also came naturally with the camera and auto-focused onto my subject. I originally had the idea of making a photo that directly involved my family but I didn't really find any ideas in my head to be very interesting so I decided to represent my family in a different way, that was more interesting and more natural to me.

For this image, my family are huge fisherman. I grew up fishing on lakes, and streams, and brooks or any body of water. My family loves to fish and so do I. I thought representing my family with a picture of a fish would show what we like to do to de-stress or just hangout and chill on a saturday afternoon or something like that. I thought it was a little bit more non-traditional than what other students would do and I kind of liked the out of the box approach. I really wouldn't change anything about this image, I love the way it came out and I loved the way I captured it as well.

-Matthew Kempf.