I had originally searched for a large exercise ball I could use for my object in my final product but fortunately managed to get my hands on a giant inflatable green ball big enough for a person to sit inside.
I felt it would be fun and an interesting experimental piece to important places from my childhood and visit them as almost an alien entity. By taking multiple photos of the ball being held in the air and my location I was able to imitate the look of it floating and interacting with its surroundings much like a child in the park and throughout the process it even seemed to develop a personality the way it explored mazes and hid behind trees in the park. I used a similar technique to that of photographers that create levitation photographs with people or objects by merging the images together and getting rid of who was holding up the object. I felt the colour worked extremely well as it stood out from the environment whilst complementing it’s surroundings particular the greener areas I visited. I like to think the ball could represent myself being as I tend to stand out as a person and with green being my favourite colour that I really resonate with. This gave me a chance to get really creative and tell a visual story about this object’s travels and hopefully provoke some thought with my interesting images such as “what is that object?” “what is it doing?” “where is it from?” “why is it there?” which I asked myself throughout the course of producing my images.
I added a smudge effect to the ball to give it a paranormal and unearthly feel in order to maybe provoke even more emotions and possible interpretations.
I feel like my six chosen images show enough diversity in regards of location which really illustrating this object’s adventures, perhaps it also looking for home or searching for a replace that reminds it of home?
In future projects I think it would be interesting to play with the scale of the ball and saturate the images colours even further to create something over worldly. I had experimented with fade effects over the images to capture the idea of an old family photo but felt it took away from the bold and abstract colours. I think movement is really captured in these photos, really showing the juxtaposition of the object and it’s environment.
I hope to try a similar technique in other locations perhaps some more desolate and run down in appearance for much more of a contrast as I tried to do with my quarry image.
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