Dreaming in Color: A Senior Surreal Photo by Cameron Conway (2016)

This is the story of a girl who has lived her whole life underground, and therefore in black and white, until one day she has a dream where she sees colors. In her dream she is in another universe where she is living above ground in a world full of color, but she can only walk along a path or she will fall into an endless field of giant grass blades. She sees flowers that are bigger than she is on the sides of her and she takes pictures of them in the hopes that they will be on her camera when she wakes up. She also tries to take photos of the giant water droplets that would never be able to stay that size or shape in her world. There are two versions of herself taking two different pictures to show that she isn't able to understand the wackiness of this world on her own.

In order to make this piece I took an HDR photo of my friend Celine and an up close HDR shot of dewy grass along with some non-HDR photos of flowers and a field. To make my HDR picture of dewy grass look more interesting, I increased the contrast and saturation. I made my picture of Celine black and white by lowering the saturation of her all the way. I took a selection of the photo of a field and turned down the opacity so that it would look like a path. I used the liquify tool to drag the edges of the path to the side so it looked more dreamy. I also took smaller selections of the field that I put Celine on and put them onto a new layer above all of the other layers but still in the same location so that Celine looked like she was in the grass and not just a photo on top of a photo because she originally was not in a grass field at all. I enlarged the photos of flowers that I took and again used the liquify tool to distort their appearance to make them more dreamlike. I also messed around with the color curves of my flower photos to change their colors.