Nothingness

Artist Statement:

For this project, I had to take photos and use photoshop to create a theme of nothingness. Nothingness is quite a broad term, but in this context, I had to somehow edit parts of the images away so that there was nothing there. To take these photos I had to first, take a picture with my subject in it, and second, take a picture of the setting without the subject in it, making sure to keep the camera in the same position to the best of my ability. While coming up with an idea for this project, I knew I wanted to have some sort of element of framing, and repetition. I wanted this because it would make cutting parts out of the image go a lot smoother in the editing process. I used a fence and the side of a porch for my framing. I told my friends to do something to the framing like stand near it, look through it, or hold on to it somehow. This made it so I would be able to cut out certain frames in photoshop.

The photos were pretty easy to take for this project but the more complex part was editing them in photoshop. To edit these, I first edited them on the photos app just by enhancing them, making sure to do similar edits to both images. After this was done, I uploaded the photos and used the select tool to select the parts of the photo that I wanted to get rid of. This took me a little while just because I wanted to be specific and I also had a lot that I was getting rid of. After I had everything that I didn't want selected, I used the layer mask tool to smooth out my selections, invert them, and finally, erase them. This left me with my final product and all I had to do is some final touches such as cropping.

I really like how my final product turned out. It was really fun learning these new tools on photoshop. I noticed that when I finish an edit on photoshop it is very satisfying to look at the final product. It is hard to pick a favorite from this assignment but I do really like the first one. I like it because it is sort of mysterious and it makes you wonder what the subject is doing or thinking about.