Kyle Kopta Digital Imaging

   The following images are part of what I have been working on for my final project. I have three projects I am working on concurrently, so the goal of this week is to decide on which project will become my final. The recent weather has been a challenge for one of my projects, so this post features some images from two of my three projects.    The first project (which takes up a majority of this post) is one I have tentatively titled Neon Noir . This series of images started as a project I was working on separate from an assignment in class. My goal was to study a photographer that I admired and try to emulate what I liked about their work. However, this quickly evolved from studying one specific photographer into studying an entire trend in photography known as cyberpunk or outrun photography. This style of art and photography has recently become extremely popular with the rise of Vaporwave music and the recently released Blade Runner 2049 film. The typical cyberpunk photogra

   The following is a list of artists of many different mediums that I have drawn inspiration from throughout my life. I felt the need to create this list in the first place because I thought it might be interesting to reference and that it might reveal some of the subconscious ideas in my head behind why I do things the way that I do in my work. Although it is important to be original in what you do, it is also important to acknowledge that you are the product of what you see and what you admire. As artists continue to inspire me, I add them to the list. I have separated the artists by medium.     Photographers Nan Goldin Steve Roe Philip Lorca DiCorcia Daniel Mercadante Erin S. Murray Gabriel Isak Joshua Aronson Tanner Abel Platon     Video Directors Damien Chazelle Stanley Kubrick Titanic Sinclair John Hughes François Truffaut Hayao Miyazaki Spike Jonze Alejandro Jodorowsky     Traditional Artists Egon Shield Nikinikill Jean-Michel Basquiat  

  This past week experimenting with low-light photography, lighting portraits, and painting with light have been extremely fun for me. Aside from the final pictures themselves, the process of taking these pictures has been very rewarding as well. With these images, I was able to work in two very different ways; I was either working collaboratively with others or alone in a dark room experimenting with the camera pointed towards myself. Both ways of working can be greatly effective, but the collaboration and working with others this week has been my favorite part.    For instance, the landscape photographs were taken with James and another friend after class on Thursday. Working with James was very beneficial for me because I have very little experience shooting landscapes, let alone long-exposure landscapes when it is pitch black outside. Going on this mini adventure for this vantage point gave me a newfound appreciation for landscape photography as well. Although it might not b

   In my experiments with lighting a portrait, I wanted to explore how one could "sculpt" the face through lights and shadows. In traditional portraiture, light is extremely important in rendering the emotion and mood of a sketch or painting; surely, the same must be true in a photograph. With my love for low-light photography in mind, I decided to deliberately highlight and obscure the face in order to push certain features of the face to tell a unique story. Although both images use harsh and colorful lights to carve out the features of the face, the quality of the light and the way that it is positioned in each respective photograph allows for different readings of the face.    The first image is much more surrealistic and mysterious in the sense that the face exists in stark contrast against the black background. I was intentional with what colors hit each part of the face (red on the mouth, blue on the eye, etc), and this way of taking a portrait was extremely fun

   Regardless of how my documentary turned out in the end, the experience of it has been invaluable, and the lessons I have learned from it are ones that I can apply to all of my work in the future (both in photography and elsewhere). If you had asked me just a few months ago to hunt down a stranger in a different town and ask them to collaborate with me on a project, I wouldn't have thought I could possibly achieve that. Although the project has been done for several days now, I am still finding myself thinking about it all the time, which is a clear indicator to me that the project was worth something substantial in and of itself.    I don't know why I care so much about Gerry Matthews and his little museum in Walla Walla, but I do. I found Gerry's museum through the website Atlas Obscura , and I was immediately intrigued by the polarizing reviews of his work. One online reviewer describes Gerry's work as "a weird collection of a perverted old man's garbag