Portrait:

I took this photo of myself leaning over the railing on the dock of the Sand Street Beach in Stony Brook. When editing this photograph, I corrected the distortion that resulted from me not being able to take a photograph parallel to the surface of the water, and I cropped the photograph to be slightly smaller. I also adjusted the color of the water to be more green as it was in real life, and increased the contrast to bring my silhouette out from the very similar background.

The last couple of edits I made to this photograph were increasing the saturation and texture. I feel like this photograph has an enigmatic quality to it, in that it is no longer intuitive that I took this photograph of myself pointing the camera into the water. My form could appear as a shadow in front of a blue sheet or a textured paper backdrop, or as a shadow shining through the back of some translucent material.

Object:

For the object aspect of this project, I created a set-up on a desk using brown packing paper as a backdrop to position white eggs against. Using my task lamp, I created a harsh light above the eggs which cast intense shadows that almost create an illusion of a hole that the eggs are about to fall into. I spent some time arranging the eggs among each other and changing their orientation until I left them each in slightly different angles.

They appear to transition from being white eggs, to the egg in the left hand of both photos more resembling a white sphere. The neighboring eggs provide context for this egg that would otherwise not be readily identifiable. Staging the eggs against the unassuming brown paper backdrop creates a portrait-like focus that commands the attention of the viewer to these objects, as if these eggs were congregating for a group photo.