Shanet Yang, City Reimagined
Concept
The concept for my diptych was to create something that did not exist in our world, and reimagine it in a that it could. Through my photo diptych, I wanted to create a feeling of surrealism by incorporating elements that can be found through our daily lives. However, the sizing and composition stems from reimagining the things and places we see into something that can only exist in our imagination which is why I decided to have my background set as flowers and blend multiple places into the picture to make it look like an actual destination.
I paired these image by playing around with photoshop. While I had an idea of what I wanted to convey, I did not know how to get to message across. As I like the composition of flowers that I originally took, I wanted to incorporate this into my final work in someway. These two image relate to each other because I decided to shrink the bigger things in life and focus on things that are smaller which is how I ended up using the flowers as my background.
Process
My original idea and final design is quite different. My original concept was to do something with a coffee shop and give off the vibes as someone sitting in a coffee shop on sunny afternoon. However, to capture this, I wanted to go out and take pictures on a nice sunny day. The plans did not go as I had imagined so I took took pictures of the objects and places I was around. Because things did not go as I had plan, I decided I also wanted to incorporate this idea of expectations vs reality in my photo diptych.
As I was creating the second part of my image I wanted to contrast the edited pictures of a sunny day because it was actually very gloomy that day. To create this contrast, I did not experiment with the colors of the cloud and turn downed the overall saturation after I brightened up the reds. To come up with the composition I had, it was mainly experimentation because I found that the best way to get ideas onto the screen. While I wanted to have sketch before I edited, I found myself constantly restarting and that got me nowhere, so I decided to work directly on the photos.
Conclusion
While the drafts I worked with are quite different from my final, I would improve my project by erasing the sun as I have received feedback that it draws attention away from the battle half of the diptych. Furthermore, I would also take out some flowers that framed the sun to create a visual balance between both halves. Although I did not take screenshots of my previous drafts, I learned a lot through photoshop, as well as being able to experiment with all the tools offered. Coming into this class, photoshop was something that I was interested in, so I am glad I got to experience the features through my photo diptych.
