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Artist Statement

For this assignment we had the objective to take a photo that represented home life. For my photo I took a picture of myself, laying down in front of the fridge door sleeping with the jug of milk in my arms. I chose this because I think it represented boredom and craziness in both ways. For this photo I grabbed my camera and a tripod and set them down about a foot and half away from me, zoomed in to about 45 mm and used a self timer to take the photo. The edits I did to this image were; I used the dodge tool in photoshop to brighten up areas on the left side of my face as well as brighten up some glossy areas on the milk jug just to make the fridge light feel more apparent. I also used photoshop to turn up the exposure and contrast just so you were able to see my face a little more clearly. For this image I really tried to focus on color and how the color presented itself from the fridge to give everything a little more emphasis.

For the compositional techniques I used, I used rule of thirds, informal balance, and low key lighting. The rule of thirds comes in where I am in the left part of the image, as well as informal balance. The low key lighting is seen all throughout the image because of how dark it is. My thought process for this image really started where I thought a multiplicity image would be a good idea. it would show boredom and true thoughts through quarantine. Then when i was editing it, it didn't look right, it was boring, and simply wasn't up to my standards. So I saw the fridge and thought that was a fun idea, and did a self portrait instead.

The story behind this image is, I got a new camera the other week and I was watching youtube videos on long exposure, portraits photography, etc. and thought a self portrait would be cool to shoot but I wanted it to look as I was lazy or bored, and many people eat when they are bored. So I decided to nap in the fridge to show how not only me, but how many other teenagers feel staying at home. This relates to my life because I don't really think of how much time we've been stuck inside and to show how bored everyone really is. The only thing I would change about this image is to shoot the raw image at a higher exposure so I don't have to edit it later and have it turn out grainy.

-Matthew Kempf