Cheshmauyeh Shirin: October 2015

When I think of polar opposites I think of black and white. My original idea was to capture black and white, as if they were feelings, in a photo. I decided I was going to use my sister as a model and paint her face white and black, which she was not too happy about because I made her walk to Walgreens with me to get the paint and then she had to pose for the picture with paint on her face for longer than she had hoped. The first photo is depicting the simple concept of black and white and the second photo is depicting a stronger emotion. I decided to shoot in my house with a black and white backdrop, which is hard because my house is a lot of natural lighting mixed with yellow tinted lights. I had to have shot 20+ photos before I finally gave up and decided I hated the yellow lighting I was getting in my photos. What I did was turn off some of the lights and went to a space with less natural lighting so that the yellow tint would go away. I was crossing my fingers and hoping it would work and fortunately for me it did. This is when I decided to capture the two photos. The hardest part was picking which photos I wanted to post and came down to two that I just could not decide between. When I look at both photos, I get chills because it really speaks to my heart and empathizes with my feelings. I thought it would be really cool to do a sort of checkerboard look. The contrast between the black and white colors fascinates me. The white resembles the times in life where people feel lighter in their mood. The black resembles the times where people feel heavier in their mood. A person might feel lighter when they are happy or they have no stress. A person might feel heavier when they have a lot of stress and hardships in their life at the moment. I feel lighter when I’m playing sports and I am just having a good time. In order to feel lighter, I need to let myself go and be free. Sometimes I cannot always be happy, so this is when I feel heavier. I might feel heavier when I have a lot going on at school or at home that makes me stressed or when I am feeling sad about things going on in my life. The black and white colors can be interpreted differently. Black could mean that your life is full of baggage, which can be good, that makes you who you are today and that fills your life with excitements. White could mean your life is bare and bland and needs some excitement. The overlapping of the black and white colors is essential. Our lived are not balanced, but because we want it to be, we try as hard as we can to fill it with both good and bad things. Both sides have both black and white because each person tries too hard to make their life balanced. Both people in the photos have parts of them that have different amounts of heavy and light emotions. Although they have both lighter and heavier emotions, one emotion outweighs the other. The person on the left has more of a lighter life than the person on the right and the person on the right has more of a heavier life than the person on the left. This just goes to show that we cannot change who we are and what happens to us. What we can do is change how we react to these things in our life because that makes us who we are.