Focus & Collect
The focus for my story, “Nature at Home” (the working title), is areas around and inside my apartment. Right behind my apartment there are trails leading to the Piney Knoll conservation area and if you walk a bit further southwest the Penobscot River. I’ve chosen to focus on these two different environments to contrast the difference between the familiar things all around us and possibly the unfamiliar things also always surrounding us. I intend to do this by superimposing images from nature with images taken inside my house this will contrast the things we can name with the textures of things we maybe can’t. Things that we interact with in everyday life actively (like kitchen appliances, bedroom and living room settings, etc), and things we interact with passively but also on a day to day basis, such as trees, animals, or even the wind. This is important to me because in learning about my surroundings I’ve learned how little I know about the things around me, things I take for granted without any notice. For example, Maine has fifty-two native leaf trees and I still can’t name, let alone point out, a handful.
The purpose of this is to hopefully inspire the audience to go outside their own homes and learn something about the place they live that’s always there that they’ve maybe never noticed. This could be many things, I mentioned the trees here in Maine, but in Maine and other places this extends vastly. Things we could be more aware of include animal species around the house in the last six months, the cardinal directions from where you are now, the rocks, minerals and soil all around the foundation of your house, the fertility of the soil, the edible plants and seasons of availability, and the list could go on.
Organize
The following are organized into two categories, settings and textures. The textures are going to be heavily edited in most cases to pull out heavy contour lines and the texture of the picture whereas the settings will just be edited to adjust color and placement, but otherwise left alone.