Hey ladies and germs! It’s your girl, Yu Ling. You may remember me from the column Is This Loud Enough?. You have probably been wondering what I’ve been up to these past few weeks. To be quite honest, nothing really. (Totally kidding.) These past few weeks have actually been the craziest, busiest, and most rewarding weeks of my life. I recently graduated from high school, and the question everybody seems to be asking is “Where are you headed next year?”. The month of March, as many seniors know, is complete and utter hell. Acceptances and rejections from colleges all over the country make their way to your email inbox, and for me, my plans didn’t go exactly as expected. So I spent a good month moping about my crushed dreams, wiping off the tears of injustice from my face. I asked myself questions like “How will I ever make it to New York City?”, “Will I ever make it big and star on Saturday Night Live?” and of course, “What if Lady Gaga hates me and this is her trying to ruin my life?” As you can tell, I was having a real pity party. It was not until mid-May that I realized the thing that was stopping me from pursuing my dream was myself. So I got out of my crusty clothes, threw away the scattered bags of Cheetos around my room, and decided to take action. This column will be showcasing what came out of those few weeks through a series of photographs, as well as my other creative projects! I hope you enjoy!
It all started with one sentence, addressed to Michael of The Silver Surfer, which was: “Mike, do you know how to use Photoshop?”.
The crew made our way down to the beach, and I was determined to get a photo of me levitating. You can see how well that turned out for me by viewing the following pictures.
Here I am, trying to stay balanced on top of this flimsy trashcan. You can tell that Iknow something bad is going to happen.
After the great fall. Michael and Glenn made sure I didn’t consume too much sand on my trip down.
The aftermath.
As you can see, shooting for this first photo did not end up as well as I hoped. I wasn’t particularly fond of the visuals/colors, so we ended up scrapping the project and writing it off as a great learning experience.
A few days later, I was back at The Wave, once again determined to get a levitation photo. We found some buckets and used that to give me the proper height needed to look like I was floating in space. Just as I was about to get on the buckets, I noticed a bag of green apples that we had on the table. “What if I was munching on an apple while floating?” I thought to myself. So I grabbed one and did just that. It eventually turned into something else, when Michael and I thought of how cool it would look if it were “raining apples”. Here’s what we ended up creating:
This photo sparked the rest of my ideas. It reminded me that while creating art, there really are no boundaries. That was the start of a brand new beautiful relationship with me and my camera.
