Photo Illustration

This past week in my digital photo class we've learned a lot about photo illustration. The photo above is by Jerry Uelsmann. He has hundreds and hundreds of pictures that he likes to arrange in cool ways. Everything he does is created in the dark room. He must have amazing burning and dodging skills. All his images are very dreamlike and sometimes creepy (be careful when you look him up...there are some scary images...I warned you).

What I love about his work is that there is no concept whatsoever. I think that sometimes people get to caught up trying to explain what a piece of artwork means that they miss how beautiful the piece really is. It's very rare that any of my pieces have hidden meanings or back stories. They are usually just an idea that I've had rolling around in my head that finally came out on a page or in a print.

Here is my most recent print. I've had the idea of people standing on books for awhile now...don't ask me why...it's just an image I've had in my head. So I went through all my pictures and looked for images of people standing in cool positions. As soon as I saw this picture of Samuel and Dana that I took out at Sea Ranch I knew I had to use it. Then I photographed a stack of books, trying to mimic the lighting that was on the kids...I wasn't very succesfull at that, but whatever. I originally planned on making the covers of the books look like puddles of water...but that didn't really work so I just extracted the riverbed along with the two kids and placed it on top of the books. The next thing to do was choose an environment to place it all in. Looking through my pictures I found all these images of clouds that I took last semester...so I figured: why not have them floating through the skies? But seriously, wouldn't that be so fun? Floating around on giant books is my new dream. Anyways, after everything was finally put together I decided to take all the color out so it wouldn't be so distracting. It took me 5+ hours to do...but I had so much fun! This is for sure my favorite print I've done. Let me know what you think!

Raymundo