Conceptual Project Image
I chose my lacrosse helmet and stick because they directly related to my concept statement. I decided to shoot at night with a flash and a spotlight so I could get really defined shadows. I wanted my background to have a lot of texture and to have a fairly bland color pallet so my subject with its bright shiny surfaces would stand out. I shot with my subjects filling the image at a diagonal to create a sense of movement between the objects.
The two objects, my lacrosse stick, and helmet represent my concept statement because of my experiences with them. Playing lacrosse I’ve gotten two concussions. This image represents the latter of the two. Where I got slashed in the head. I got one concussion in that helmet and I decided to keep playing and I got another one. I justified playing by say what were the chances but it happened again and I had to deal with the consequences.
First, I used the pen tool to select my stick and helmet from the background. I had tried using other tools first because they would have been faster but, they didn’t give good enough results. Then I made the background black and white using an effects layer. That just looked a little strange to me so I ended up using a saturation layer and just desaturating it almost all the way. I wanted the subject to sand out a bit more so I add some saturation to it. I also didn’t like the angles that my helmet and stick were at so I cropped and rotated them. By rotating the image I created white space in my image. I created a black rectangle larger than my image because the places where there was white should have been black. I had to flatten my image an the rectangle together because in the bottom right corner of the image the black didn’t fit. Because I flattened the layers it meant that I could use the healing brush to get rid of the black and extend the texture of the ground.