Personal Metaphor

I chose the metaphor that I did because I was running out of ideas. I had another idea to incorporate myself into a stack of playing cards, but that didn’t really worked out. So, I had to crunch ideas behind my desk and come up with something interesting. After much debate, I finally came with the idea of incorporating myself into a phoenix. As the cards were supposed to show that I felt lucky, the phoenix was supposed to show that I was reborn. I wanted to express a feeling of liberation by making myself float away from the base of the fire.

I tried to place myself in the upper right hand corner of the photo. To emphasize the focal area, I motion blurred the photo to the point where all the people were out of focus. I think my composition is balanced only because my focal point wasn’t in the center. Other than that, I think the image feels unified because I successfully combined myself with the bonfire quite well.

I think that I did a really good job combining myself with the bonfire in Photoshop. However, I had to do quite a bit of experimenting in order to get it to work right. I had a lot of problems blending in the colors and making myself blend in smoothly with the fire. What I could have done better was actually putting the wings of my phoenix on me so that way it would have been better to understand the metaphor. I tried putting on wings, but I didn’t think that it looked correctly with the photo. If I could change anything on my project though, I would have got a better source photo.