Imagine Running: A Senior Surreal Photo by Nolan Rudolph (2016)

Have you ever been on a long road trip, where you're constantly bickering with your sister and your parents are constantly arguing? Then when everything seems like it can't get any worse, you break apart from all the arguing and look out the window. There's a lot of things that catch your attention as you stare through the glass, but nothing attracts your attention more than the phone lines that seem to expand in contract with every foot you drive. It begins to look like a rollercoaster the more you stare at the inanimate string and you begin to wonder what it would be like if a superhero were to be running alongside of you. Your imagination begins to run wild as you imagine all the different situations that this phone pole could be involved in. Instinctively, you put your hand up to the window and began to pretend that your fingers are a runner's legs. You start slowly, picking up speed as the car accelerates. You keep running along the phone line, but you start to realize that your fake character is constantly running into the actual phone poles. Making this realization, you begin to jump over the phone pulls as you run along the line. Eventually you work up the courage to jump on the cars, going from a small jump to the small cars into a big jump for the larger cars. Finally, your car comes to a stop and you skid yourself to a halt.

This is the message I was attempting to portray in this photo. At the time of a beautiful sunset, I shot a picture of five different times during the sunset that I put together using an HDR preset. Finally, an even more beautiful picture came about, and I noticed how familiar the phone lines looked, as I remember gliding across them with my fingers every time we came back from long road trip. Then I shot a few variations of my hand and edited them into a PNG file where I placed that on the original background. I then edited my hand variations so that they seemed to walk along the line. After doing a final edit of the photo, I was very pleased with the result as it brought me back to my childhood.