For my final project, I chose to look at the idea of coming of age, and what that means in college. I know that I, along with most of friends, struggle with feeling like we “have it together.” There are plenty of times where I feel like a mess, but the people around me seem to be achieving their goals and are surrounded by friends, and I get worried that I’m falling behind. However, I know that even if it takes me longer to get it together, I’ll get there eventually.
I chose to show this in a pretty literal way in my project, by having a girl sitting by herself as successful business people and a happy couple walk by. I’m pretty happy with the job I did cutting them out of their respective images and fitting them into the background photo. There were definitely differences in the lighting and filters on the photos so they don’t look as natural (or like they all belong in the same photograph) as I wanted, but I’m happy with what I did. The other main thing that I did to edit the image is add a sunrise effect by playing with the lighting. The original background picture looks dark and rainy, but by editing a sunrise in, I showed that there are good things ahead for the lonely girl. Also, I think that making it lighter helped the color in the rest of the image stand out, because there are lots of different colors in the houses and cars.
Overall, I’m happy with my project. It was a little bit on-the-nose, but it definitely conveyed the themes and ideas that I wanted.
