Conceptual Project: A Junior Design Student Conceptual Project by Elijah Confortola (2017)

I am exploring the feeling of reluctance when following my instincts.

I took a picture of a pea sprout and a crack. The pea sprout was carefully placed in the crack as to look planted. My goal was to make the shot look uncomfortable and natural at the same time. My angle was head-on and up close to my pea to get all of its little imperfections and details. Because of the primitive connotation that sprouts have, I used one in my picture to represent human instincts. Planting it in a cement crack was a metaphor for humans when they are hesitant to follow these instincts. When we don’t want follow our instincts we intentionally put them in a hidden place within ourselves. Putting a plant where you know it will not grow reflects this feeling.

In photoshop, I used the crop tool which helped me to get the focal points of my photo in proper view using the rule of thirds. I also created a vignette to focus in on my picture, giving it a nice, clean frame. To do this, I used an ellipse tool and put a large oval shape on top of a copied layer of my photo. I then subtracted the shape, turned up the feathering, and turned down the opacity. This left my picture with a nice looking black frame to add to the dark, unpleasant tone of my picture.