I HAVE RETURNED!
I’m alive.
And today is my birthday.
CELEBRATE MY EXISTENCE.
It’s an interesting day.
I’m in the doctor's office with my mom right now.
She’s got a hematoma in her knee.
Which is basically a bruise that would stop bleeding internally.
Causing a pool or bubble of blood.
So we are trying to get that sorted.
AND ALSO!
The grandfather is in the hospital.
He had an accident and had to go to the ER.
While he was there, they tested his blood and found out he has leukemia.
So they shipped him down to Indianapolis for further treatment.
So this birthday is an interesting one indeed.
We are getting closer to the big 3-0.
I’m worried.
I’m getting old.
Maybe that’s why I went into an existential crisis.
Let’s just get into the photo…
YEP.
The past 477 photos have shown how I feel at different times.
This is why I’ve been gone for four months.
I had a moment where I didn’t feel anything.
I make a photo when I’m feeling something.
If I’m not feeling anything, how am I going to make a photo?
It was an endless loop.
I was just in my room, doing nothing.
……….. THAT’S IT.
If I’m doing nothing… I should show me doing... nothing!
That’s all I needed to create a little spark AND BOOM!
I was making things.
A series of five photos came to me.
Starting off dark and moving into something light.
Kind of like the secret story that Yellow Project was telling.
With that said, here we are.
At the start.
It’s dark, it’s moody.
This shows how I was feeling a few months ago.
I normally don’t go this extreme with my photos.
Sometimes there’s a hidden story.
But I’ve never been this upfront about it.
This series will be very artistic.
I’ve had these thoughts before, especially in my college days.
I would get a photo assignment done and think… “is this too artistic?”
I try to not be too stylized.
I don’t pose or stage things.
I keep things real and grounded.
This project is a blend of those two.
It’s staged and stylized, but it’s real and grounded.
This is just the start.
Things get better.
The project helped me.
I like doing this.
Once I finally made the series and looked at everything, I was happy.
I made something!
I MADE ART!!
Let move on to the editing stuff.
This project was a little complex behind the scenes.
This photo was the easiest to edit.
The ones later on have multiple layers each doing different things.
Each photo had at least 4 or 5 layers in Photoshop.
All to serve the vision that I had in my mind of what this series was supposed to be.
Anyways, this photo was the easiest.
All I did was slide the saturation down.
But I felt like it needed more.
So I started messing with things.
Cranked up the contrast.
Played with the clarity slider and further boost the contrast.
I even added grain!
I like to keep my photos noise free.
I shoot at ISO100 to keep the noise at a minimum.
This time, I felt like it needed some noise.
It’s a gritty photo and it needed that grit!
So I sprinkled in a little bit of noise which really brought the photo together.
That’s it.
COMPARE!
Hover your mouse (the computer one) over the original picture to see the changes I did.
If you're on a touchscreen device, just tap on the picture. You may have to tap more than once.
Alright.
That’s all I have for now.
This project took a while to make which caused the making-of video to be long as well.
Luckily, I got things trimmed down to around an hour and fifteen minutes.
The Yellow Project was an hour and a half, so I’d say things worked better this time.
I split the whole video up into four parts.
There are five photos in the series, so after this there will be a video for each photo.
I wanted to use this post as an introduction to everything.
Plus in case I wanted to make a birthday video, I’d have room for that.
But things are a bit complicated today, so I don’t think there will be a birthday video.
With that being said, that’s all I’ve got.
I’ll be back next week with the continuation of the series!
Here's a note that I added just before publishing this post.
I mentioned that I was at the doc office with my mom.
Well, they said she should go to the ER.
So I typed up most of this post while in there with her.
A lot of waiting.
The x-rayed her knee to see how bad things were.
They tried to drain the pool of blood inside her knee, but the blood is too thick.
Then my dad showed up and I came home.
Don't know what's happening now.
We'll see how things are next week.
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