Simply Transparent: A Senior Surreal Photo by Patrick Ogaz (2015)

This composition depicts a glass that is overturned on a table. Within the glass there is a whole separate world that shows a red paper crane floating in a lake-like ocean. The paper crane was originally white but is now red to draw attention to its importance to the piece. This piece emulates a whole ecosystem inside a small glass which is obviously not possible but also has a small body of water within the glass as well. Within this project I used a lot of camera raw, HDR photos (High Dynamic range photos), and a lot of Photoshop to merge the photos into one very cohesive photo. I used a lot of layers to add and stitch multiple photos together. For example the mountains the water and the bird within the glass are all separate photos that were merged together to give the scene the more realistic look I desired.

To me this creations subjective meaning was about how something simple can have such a importance to the whole world we see. I wanted to first have the bird and the water together to show the two similar yet different lives of birds and water. My comparison of a bird and water is that while both are different both are fluidic in motion and both have a destination to get to. Both have a nice sound whether chirping or the lapping of the water on the sea shore, the sounds they make are a large essence of nature. I put both the water and the bird together in the glass showing that they coexist and that they both need each other in order to survive. I additionally have both in a glass in an attempt to express how both coexist together, sometimes even behind glass or in the smallest ways almost seemingly transparent in our daily life. Yet both have such a huge impact on what makes the earth so exclusively beautiful. The color scheme I was working for was the look of dark and edgy. I used a lot of black and white and then red to emphasize to make this feeling. These colors complements of the mindset something important can come from something so simple.