A diptych is a juxtaposition of two pictures. They have things in common and relate, but also have opposing meanings. They are metaphorical in this case, and they relate to my personal statement, "Conquering my fears doesn't always have to involve putting myself out there".

For the assignment in Design, we had to shoot two different images that had something to do with our personal statement.

“Like a pebble in my shoe / That soon morphs into a nail piercing through my foot / Watching as the scarlet blood drips / Silently admiring how it shines”.

This is the line for the left side of my diptych. I chose the rose with black paint on it to symbolize the pain and hurt that I have been through in my life. I didn’t want to make the picture literal, so I decided not to have actual blood dripping from a wound. The pain that this represents is more than just physical, it is also emotional. The physical pain I have endured does not make me hurt, it just lets me feel something other than numbness. The feeling of nothingness has consumed my life, and I wanted to represent the rays of feeling I do have. “My phobia of people finding out my secrets / Is like a black tidal wave ready to crash over me”. The picture on the left, the crack in the ground, represents this line of my poem. I couldn’t photograph an actual tidal wave, so I had to pick something that was far less intimidating, yet still gets the message across. Earthquakes happen all over the world, and they consume and destroy everything in their path, much like a tidal wave. My fear of people getting too close to me has consumed my life, like the numb feeling, and it has made me extremely paranoid. The crack represents that fear left behind by the overwhelming pain and numbness.

In my first picture on the left, I used a rose from my backyard and black paint that I found. As the shoot progressed, I poured more and more paint on the rose until it was eventually completely covered. I liked the photo that I used the best because it still shows the red of the rose yet also conveys the darkness of the paint. I did this in my backyard, and I positioned it so that the lighting was all pretty neutral. In my second picture on the right, I shot a crack on the ground, also in my backyard. The light was just from the sunny day, and it is coming from the top right position relative to the crack. For both shoots, I used ISO 100 and 5.6 aperture, varying the shutter speed as I went.