T H E S T O R Y
During my first quarter at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Fall 2015, I spent a lot of time exploring the city of Savannah, Georgia. I figured that if it was going to be my (hot and humid) home for the next four years of my life, I might as well get to know it pretty well. One of the places I explored was the historic Bonaventure Cemetery, which is arguably the most beautiful cemetery I've ever seen; at the very least, it was certainly the largest. It sprawls for what seems like miles, with elaborate tombs that sometimes reach the size of small backyard sheds and decorative headstones that have weathered the ages.
I visited Bonaventure with a friend from my Design I class. She's also a fellow photographer, so, naturally, both of our cameras came along. We took pictures of the headstones, mausoleums, the surrounding foliage, and each other, which was all well and good, but I wanted to do something more with the photos I had of her.
"Murder" is the product of my Bonaventure adventure. It's a composite photograph that I superimposed blackbirds onto to create a much more conceptual photgraph. I like to produce my photographic work in series, but I unfortunately created this work the week during midterms as part of a presentation for a different class, and I didn't have any spare time to finish the series off. Once midterms were over, my mind had to go elsewhere. However, I think I almost like "Murder" more as a standalone piece than I would have liked it in a group of three or four other similar photos.
“Murder”
October 2015
Digital Photograph
P R O C E S S
My process of creating “Murder” was fairly simple but still took around five hours to complete. I put together ten separate photos to create the composite image, then used layer adjustments to change the colors a bit and have a creepier, more sinister mood to the photograph. For the last step, I placed images of crows sourced from the Internet that I made transparent myself onto the base photograph. Using the radial and Gaussian blur Photoshop effects, I made it seem like the birds were flying frenzily around my friend.
I had never made a timelapse film of photo-editing or other art-creating processes, but I needed a visual aid for my class presentation, so I decided to give it a go. It turned out better than I would've expected and visually shows my process, just at 500x speed. Music Credit: “Oceans Brawl” by Cœur de Pirate
The progression of “Murder” from a single photograph to a composite image and then, finally, a finished conceptual edit.
