Freestyle Academy proudly presents

The Entry: A Senior Surreal Photo by Savanna Li (2013)

For this project, I tried to create a balanced photograph with symmetry and a range of darks and lights. In total I used 3 images: an outdoor cafeteria (with a ramp that leads down to it), a frozen windshield, and a stack of wood. To create this image, I cropped and isolated part of the cafeteria picture with Photoshop. Then I placed an image of a frozen windshield in the background because I liked its texture and the strange sunlight streaming through. I used the effect of HDR on the stack of wood and placed it on both sides of the cafeteria. HDR is a range of methods to provide higher dynamic range from the imaging process and requires multiple identical pictures with different exposures. I felt as though the background and the ramp were too obviously photoshopped and unnatural so I made a copy of the ramp, flipped it, and placed it on top of the background so it would make organic angles and intersections with the original ramp image. I had a lot of trouble with the colors and the shadows so to make the image look more unified, I converted the whole image into black and white.
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