Project 2 paper

Eli Hoversten

                The character that I chose to portray in this self portrait is an office “Big Wig.”  In order to get this portrait, I cleaned off my very messy desk, pulled it out to the middle of the room, and sat in my office rolling chair. I had one of my good friends, named Cassie take this picture for me. I was slightly unsure of what fancy office people had on their desks, so I put down my lap top, me 1^st place trap shooting trophy from the gun club back in Marshall, and some random papers. For props I used a graph that I printed off of the internet and a cigarette that I borrowed from my friend. (I am a non- Smoker and the cigarette that I used was strictly a prop and was not smoked by me.)

                When told about this assignment, I was excited to start and start brainstorming different ideas. Some of the ideas that I tossed around were, redneck hunter, chef, Nascar driver, gangster, and even a cowboy. In the end I decided to do a business man because I thought that it would be the most challenging, mostly because I know the least about that kind of thing.

                I had to use photoshop in order to “tweak” the final image. In the original, you can see just some random things thrown around my bedroom, and my bed. Also the front of my desk was not black like the rest of it so I had to do some coloring on the front of my desk.  The Chevy Sales poster in the back was originally just a  sheet of computer paper and was very small looking when I finished the portrait. So I went into photoshop and got some different experiences with layers to enlarger just the poster in the background, this was kind of challenging but I remembered bits and pieces of information from my old photography class back in high school and I was able to pull it off.

                Some of the reasons that I didn’t proceed with the other Ideas was because I am kind of already to be considered “redneck” by some of my peers, so it wouldn’t really be changing my identity much at all. I didn’t change myself into a chef  is because I thought that it might be way to easy and was not much of a challenge for me. I thought that if I were to be a gangster that it might be viewed by some as obsene or tasteless and I didn’t want to offend anyone on the internet. I was going to be a Nascar driver but my racecar is at home and I really didn’t want to drive 2 hours just to take a picture.