The project
For this project I wanted to comment on the monotony of everyday life, the ideas of routine, and the cyclical nature of humans. In addition, I was addressing the how humans strive for something greater and try to climbing the metaphorical ladder of success. Yet when you're in the midst of it all, you don't know where you are. In reality, you could be taking steps down the ladder and not know it. Regardless of where you are, you're moving somewhere with the cycle of life surrounding you whether you want it to or not.
As a narrative, the photographs are meant to hang side by side horizontally as if they were individual frames of a gif.
There was a lot of Photoshop manipulation in order to conceive this project. All together there was roughly twenty photographs used. In order to photograph them, I placed the camera on a tripod in a stairwell and locked the focal length. Then I took a photo of every step Evan (the model) made going up and down, and that's it! Then I went to work in photoshop. I went though all 150+ photos and found which ones when strung together would make sense and made note of the file numbers. After that I would import each image into separate layers in photoshop and mask out everything except Evan. After that, I would see how the images played together, then mask in the background. Sounds pretty simple, because it is. However it is very time consuming and tedious work. For most of the photographs, it took roughly an hour to do, the longest one taking two hours. The project would have taken a lot less time if I would have locked the focus, but I didn't, and because of that each image was millimeters off from one another and left the vertical bars on the railing separated from another by just a dozen pixels. As a result, a lot of the work was aligning the verticals bars. So from a learning standpoint always keep the focus locked when layering images. I forgot to and payed the price by only sleeping 30 minutes that night, and pulling my first all nighter of the semester. Below are screenshots of the masking process.
