Death Becomes Life: A Senior Surreal Photo by Emily Markman (2014)

The transformation that takes place is flies and moths that come out from behind the plague doctor mask, go to the tip of the nose, take flight, and slowly morph into birds. For the whole picture, the ground is dry and rotting, with a HDR shot of a plague doctor mask a little bit buried into it. Behind is an HDR shot of a gray, stormy sky. There are maggots behind one eyehole of the mask, a symbol of the birth of the bugs. For this composition, I used Illustrator for the silhouette of the birds, and Photoshop for everything else. I used photo filters and played around with saturation, contrast, and opacity levels in order to give depth to the photo.

For this piece I wanted to convey a message about death. It's scary and gross, but in the end it's peaceful and beautiful. The person's soul is free to go where it wants. I used a triad color scheme for this work, as there are three main colors in this piece; gray, brown, and blue. I chose this color scheme because I wanted it to be dark, but the hue of the blue really helped bring the mask to life, a kind of irony that I liked. I chose the plague doctor mask since it's a symbol for death.