Longboard

Here is a picture that I took with my Casio EX-Z50. It shows my longboard leaning against the wall in my hallway. I wanted to take this picture because I liked the idea of capturing two images at once. The first image is of the longboard while the second is the image that is on my longboard. First I thought about the best way to orient the longboard in order to show both the longboard and the image on it clearly. I originally had the longboard standing straight up vertically and then held my camera vertically, but the sample image that came up on the LCD didn’t quite capture what I wanted. If I were to then edit the picture by displaying it horizontally, the viewer would then see a vertical horizon (1:07 - 1:33), or at least a vertical ground. Next, I laid it sideways hoping to fix the vertical horizon effect, but still the picture just didn’t quite look right. I then settled on this angle in which the board fills as much of the frame possible and then the viewer can see the image on the longboard as well.

I also thought about “photoshopping” the image since photographers make the image seem more real by in fact essentially making them more fake. In my picture, I inverted the colors to make the picture contrast from just seeing an ordinary picture of a longboard. To invert the colors of this image, I thought there would be a program already installed on my laptop that would do that for me, but to my surprise, there wasn’t (or at least not one that I could find easily). I had to search the Internet for a program that would do this for me and I ended up downloading a demo version of a program that allowed me to invert the colors and save the image on my hard drive.

I know that this image does not seem real and it shouldn’t, considering the inverted colors, but I chose to invert the colors to make the viewer question what image they are really looking at. Are we looking at an image of a longboard or are we looking at an image on a longboard? What are we really seeing in this picture and what should we get out of it? The longboard appears to have a wave in the sunset invoking a mental image of being on the ocean. The image of a longboard is definitely based off of a surfboard, so I would understand the choice of the image on the bottom. Why on the bottom though? People can’t see the image if the longboard is being ridden. Only when it’s not ridden is the image displayed. Though, when the board is actually ridden, its purpose is to be seen as if the rider is surfing on the road, hence the terms “road surfing” or “street surfing.” I guess in a sense this image can either been seen as telling you where to surf or what to surf with.