Semester Goals

When I first started the course I had a great interest in landscape photography and I loved capturing the beauty of the natural world. Throughout the course I have gained a great interest in Adobe Photoshop, and the possibilities it provides in photo manipulation and image composites. My love of capturing amazing landscapes still remains, however now my interest has moved into creating works of art with these landscapes by adding other components (objects, people and artificial elements). I admire surreal work, as it is impossible to capture such things with a single shot, however for composite images to work they have to look convincing. So my goal for this semester is to work on my skills to create realistic image composites in a surreal style (it may sound confusing, but in this context I am using surreal to mean the style and realistic to mean the blending skills). In order to create convincing image composites I am going to work on:

• Lighting skills - One of the most important aspects to an image composite looking realistic is the lighting. I need to make sure my lighting in the studio matches the lighting of the landscape.
• Photoshop blending - I plan to do some tutorials before I start my work to finesse my Photoshop skills
• Creativity - I plan to challenge my creativity further this year than any other as now we have the freedom to capture almost anything we wish. I want to work on coming up with original ideas, and building on them to create a fantastic final image.
• Organization - This is a big one for me as I am not normally an organized person. I need to work on that this year so I can make sure all of my work gets finished in time.

After third year I would love to continue with my composite imagery. Possible jobs might include working for an advertising agency, or in fashion, but I would love to focus on more artistic pursuits. Doing book and album covers would be an ideal job for me as it includes a lot of composite imagery but also allows me to express my creativity. I also intend on teaching Photoshop classes or workshops on the side.