Conceptual Spider: A Junior Design Student Conceptual Project by Ryan Kelleher (2017)

I am exploring the feeling of dread through the need to share.

The main object in my photograph is the spider and the outline of the key hole that I am photographing through. The key hole represents the idea being locked inside myself and not wanting to share anything with other people. The spider is suppose to represent the fear in my concept statement, the spider is specific to me because have a phobia of spiders. Also the spider is on lime green web because the bright color represents openness and the statement shows that when a person opens up or is being forced to open up they feel dread. I tried to create a specific mood with the lighting where the main focus of the flashlight was on the spider, by doing this I wanted to make it feel as if the only thing in the picture is a spider and that the fear from the spider overpowers everything else. I shot the photo as a portrait to try to include the most amount of content in the photo rather than just the more blackness on the outside of the photo.The keyhole represents the a person wanting to stay locked within themselves. A keyhole generally is for a door and by having the door closed it doesn’t allow anything to get past. The idea of the keyhole is to show that there is a blocked path between other people, whom a person would normally share stuff with. The spider on the other side of the door represents the dread and fear of what opening up the door will cause. The curtains are drawn on the window behind to help portray a dark and gloomy looking room, this is to show that there is little light in the room .

In photoshop I wanted to darken the photo, because the original photo was very distracting and hard to look at. Also in the original photo the spider was really hard to see and so by darkening the photo the spider came more into focus. Some other edits that I made to the photo was to decrease the amount of green webbing that was pure white and really blinding. I edited the photo to make some of the overpowering white cobweb into a more lime green and less distracting to the overall photo. Overall I learned how applying selections to parts of the photo allows you to edit only that specific part of the photo which can be very useful if an object is bringing more attention than it should be to itself in a photo.