Mentality: A Senior Surreal Photo by Dasom Chung (2016)

My surrealist piece depicts a sort of an outdoors scene with a girl playing the piano, with nature helping to connect the girl with the piano to create beautiful music. She is releasing all of her worries and stress through the music delicately played out with all the things life could be, placing her thoughts carefully onto the piano keys. The background shows that although life can be rough at times, we must learn to look beyond to see the beauty that it can behold.

Everything you can see in the piece are created from my original photos and put together in Photoshop. I merged together photos of the same scene with different ISOs to create a High Dynamic Range photo, also known as an HDR photo. I created many HDR photos, but ended up using the one I took of the greenery in the backyard of my house and cut out the leaves to make the colorful hearts you see in the photo here. I used the color replacement effect to change the color of the leaves to fit an unintentional but very lovely Valentine's color theme. I changed some of the levels in the photos to create a scene that's not quite like the real life, and lowered the opacity of the layers so that we can see all the multiple layers creating a dreamlike piece. I kept the leaves at full opacity to maintain the focal point.