Photography: A Cotton Candy Update

Imagine a world where a creative person struggles to consistently create and do the things that make him happy. Imagine a world where a person consistently says to himself “I’ll do it another day.” Just imagine that for a second… It was pretty easy huh, probably cause you could think of me right away :)

I don’t know if anyone else goes through this, but I feel like I consistently go through these months where I don’t create anything, or do anything to help myself be happy. I just sit around and play video games or just constantly dream about doing something that I literally could just get up and go and do. I don’t know if it’s some sort of depression that I am in or if i’m just lazy all of the time. Maybe I should go to a therapist or something.

Anyhow, this is one of the months where I have actually gone and do something. I’ve began to think more critically about my creative self and i’ve gone out and shot more. Photo shooting, not the other type. I’ve even began to go running more often and i’ve even gone to the gym more frequently, which is really surprising to me. I’ve even signed up for some soccer leagues around the area so that I have something to do other than thinking about my own demise in my room.

But yeah, things are going better. Update aside, I recently made an interesting piece, last night specifically.

Recently, well more like for the past year or so I’ve been really into surrealism and using photoshop to manipulate photos that I have take in real life. I constantly find myself day dreaming about how I could make a photo interesting or how I could just bring a weird idea to life somehow. So thats where this piece came from. I had the idea mostly because I dream a lot, but also because I saw a photograph of a person with this cloud in their face. I just really wanted to do it for myself.

The whole process started out simple, I went out to this field near a friends neighborhood, making sure to bring my tripod cause I was all alone. Interestingly enough, the specific hill that I had took pictures on directly faced someones house. I mean they were pretty far away but i’m sure they were wondering why a guy in a neon hoodie was just laying on the side of a hill for God knows why. Anyways, yeah, I took a couple of pictures with different poses. I’m not very good at posing myself so I just opted for sitting cause sitting is always nice. I took some with me standing and those were not very fuego. But yeah, the sitting one was good enough and I called it a day and headed home to started editing.

Well, by “starting,” I really mean getting the photo onto my mac and then letting it sit there for two days, because thats exactly what I did. I just wasn’t really sure how to create the thing that was in my head. I hadn’t used photoshop since the last time I created a composite and I didn’t even really like that one. However, I knew I had to at least try because I would be mad upset with myself if I didn’t at least do that. Soooo I first began fixing some color and the exposure of the photo, making sure to make my orange hoodie a more interesting color. I then went to the internet to find some photos that I could use to complete my composite. I found it kinda hard to find stuff that worked with the perspective of the photo but I made do. There are some areas of the photos where it doesn’t work too well but i’m still happy with it. From there, it was just layer stuff and mask stuff out and match exposures and change colors. Nothing too too crazy, I really enjoy just doing the slightest stuff so that it’s still kinda close to real life in a way.

But yeah, that’s kinda the short version of the whole process thing. I didn’t want to be too long winded because this whole thing is already really long. Anyways, if you read the whole thing and you’re still here. Thank you for reading and listening. It means a lot, I hope you are doing okay as well. Anyways, I’ll see you the next time I am motivated to write something. Byyyyye!