http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9FZdyy5HUk&feature=youtu.be

My book cover

For my vector project I initially wanted to recreate the album cover art of one of my favorite bands Brand New. The album was called Daisy, taken from one of their hit songs. In this song the lead singer is attempting to define himself through imagery of nature and animals. Most of them are negative which is one of the reasons why the fox on the front of the album is rabid. That symbolizes passion and madness. I ended up creating my own book cover that is based off of the album. I wanted to define myself using the same type of imagery and title. The background of my project is basically the same as on the Daisy album, I took it myself at the Grand Canyon, along with the eyes at the top. I wanted to use eyes because I think that they can say a lot about a person. I tried to make them red like the foxes but it made my book seem like a horror story, so instead I bloated the center to make it look more animalistic and distorted the size. I added red daisies on the side to relate back to the red eyes and using nature. I wanted to use a very simple yet elegant text for my title because the cover was already full of detail and the text on the album is simple too. I renamed my book Shooting Daisies for a couple of different reasons. To me, daisies mean anything that is beautiful or pure, which is what I try to capture or “shoot” with my photography. Second, daisies symbolize gentleness and innocence which is also what a lamb represents which is what my name means. Red daisies represent beauty that is unknown to the possessor, which to me represents photos that I have not taken, or potential that I don’t see yet. 

For this raster project I decided to capture a time in the 1940's using a broken down place with black and white photography. I used a poem by E.E. Cummings that was also written in the 40's and I think it does a great job of portraying how the subjects are using space and time. I used the first stanza in the poem,
"in spite of everything
which breathes and moves,since Doom
(with white longest hands
neatening each crease)
will smooth entirely our minds".
I set the time period to the 1940's because there was a lot of war and chaos going on at this time but despite of all these inevitable things that have happened since the beginning of history, they subjects "neaten creases" by finding happiness in the chaos. Creases can never fully be neatened out, therefore they become content with anything that is flawed, (possibly war going on or just an argument)  and imperfections become perfect in their minds. The war is to be seen as a symbol of anything that could be going wrong in a relationship, and when things are going well, pictures usually capture what seems like a dream or what may look like engagement pictures. The time that I captured was not only supposed to be the 1940's but also relationships in general, how we spend our time and why pictures of couples look the way they do. The space I captured was full of memories and I wanted to play with all of the different spaces couples can move into at one time.


I did this by taking several different pictures from the same spot. I had to set the timer and figure out what appropriate poses to do. The Iphone ended up taking the best pictures and after I transferred them to my computer I changed them to black and white and fixed any unevenness in the photo and size. I chose one landscape to go with and basically selected only our bodies and pasted them on top. I did this several times with each scene. Sometimes I needed to adjust the size or how the picture fit, sometimes I needed to erase or go in with a paint brush and fix things like where the shoe placement was. We went out and bought clothes that we thought best represented the 1940's and found a location that seemed to capture a different time that was full of memories and didn't look modern. I used black and white because the photos were taken at different times of the day and doing this made it easiest to piece all of these photos together. Also, colors can be distracting and I wanted most of the complex parts to come from the different layers.