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Junior Conceptual: A Junior Design Student Conceptual Project by Cipriana Sorenson (2016)

The inspiration for my photograph was a section of a poem called In the Crystalline Air that I wrote based on memories I have of winters at my grandparent’s house. The lines that inspired my picture read ''Frost-coated leaves and ice-gilded ponds
Sparkling in the rising sun.'' The first line describes the beauty of the winter countryside as the sun rises on a new day through using cold, frozen imagery. The imagery in the first line alludes to a memory’s frozen nature. I drew the idea that remembering allows people to take a step back from their normal perspective into my art by freezing a leaf in water, thereby creating a giant ice cube with a leaf in the middle. The ice represents the buffer between the leaf and the viewer. The leaf represents the memory itself. The second line is a reference to the rosy way in which people remember things. Oftentimes memories are recalled with more fondness than they were made with. I portrayed the positive light that memories take on by slightly blurring the picture around the leaf.

After I wrote the poem I faced a bit of a conundrum; it is not terribly straightforward to take pictures of winter in California for obvious reasons. I eventually decided to freeze a fall leaf in a bowl of water. I shot the leaf on a white ceramic platter. In the latter half of the shoot the bottom of the ice began to melt, causing it to slide around on the platter which made it more difficult to position the shot, which resulted in tricky edits I had to make in Photoshop to remedy the background mishap. The most challenging part of the editing I did in Photoshop was to fix a corner of the background in the photograph that didn’t match the rest of the picture. I deleted the incongruous corner, copied the opposite non-problematic corner, shifted it to the other side and rotated it to fit the space. My final edits were to smudge and blur the borders of the copied corner to blend it with the rest of the picture.
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