A Dress Fit for Silvermist

dress image and waterfall image

The combophoto assignment was kind of difficult for me because I am very anal about details, so I spent a long time searching the internet for pictures I could use that would line up well. For my initial idea, I wanted to involve birds in some way. I love bird wings because they’re beautiful, especially the underside where you can really notice how the bird’s feathers fan out. I wanted to combine a bird with flowers at first but that had its own set of deterrents. The first was that the flower images I could find had too many flowers in them. Because of this,  either the background of the image seemed too busy or the flower was too small for it to match up neatly with my selected bird images. Then I thought of combining the bird photo with fire or smoke to make a type of phoenix, but when searching for creative commons images, the majority of the ones involving fire were of forests being burned down (which looking back could have been really symbolic to combine an image of a bird with an image of its home being burned down, so as I write this I kind of regret not sticking with this idea). This resulted in too much smoke in the images so it was hard to see the actual fire, or similar to the flower issue, the background was too busy with all the trees and people that were trying to put out the flames. Moving on from the fire, my next idea was to use water, specifically a waterfall, and try to match it up with the tail feathers of a bird so that I could keep my favorite part (the underside of the wings) visible. Unfortunately, this idea didn’t work out because I couldn’t seem to find a bird that matched the color of the water well enough for it not to bother me.

Finally, I scrapped my bird idea and instead focused on the waterfall because it reminded me of the skirt of a wedding dress. After finding a waterfall with a cool water pattern I looked for dresses that closely matched the color and cropped the images together.  Despite the struggle I went through to get my final result, I’m happy with it because sketching odd dress designs was a staple activity of my childhood. I went through a long phase of thinking I would be a dress designer (this phase was initiated by watching Tinkerbell and seeing the fairy dresses made from leaves and flowers). I don’t think my final image conveys anything serious, rather it’s a homage to my childhood self and her generic yet enjoyable aspirations.