My name is Near L. I’m 16, I’m in 10th grade and I go to Roosevelt High School. 

For my final CCC Photos I wanted to focus on incorporating graphic design into my work. I have always been interested in editing photos and drawing over them with cartoon graphics and it was only until the last session when I realized I could do that here because we get so much creative freedom. This quarter I’ve learned the mechanics of how to create a website which was extremely beneficial for me because I’ve always wanted to know how to do that and I found it really fun and surprisingly easier than I thought. The hard part for me personally was that there were too many designing options to choose from. 

My experience at YIF gave me a chance to learn to be less controlling of my creativity and feel more comfortable with trying out new things because of the continuous support from my teachers and peers. Big Shoutout to them. I started to go with the flow of things rather than planning every bit out and just stressing myself over nothing. Which relates to my self portrait.

I was on my way to a volleyball game by bus in Bellevue planning to use my photos from that game to edit but then my brother pointed behind me with his jaw dropped and when I turned around my jaw dropped too because the “cool” cars in my neighborhood were just cars with tattoos, but this was a real life McLaren 720S. I rushed to take the photo because the lights were about to go green and I wanted a still-picture but the car in motion ended up looking way cooler than the still-ones because it put the spotlight on this car. I was really excited to edit this one because it reminded me of old car magazine covers with the car brand and the slogan.

I took this photo on the same bus as the previous image. One of the reasons I like graphic design in photography so much is because it can express things that can’t be captured in the photo or emphasize feelings more clearly. In this case, I was on a bus and couldn’t tell if my subject was sleeping or just leaning on the window for the view because of his cool shades. Either way, the vibe I was getting was that he had a long day. I edited the photo to be more faded and grayer so the oranges from the shades and the red handle would stand out more. I initially chose the text to be yellow because it fit in with those other brighter parts but realized later that it perfectly went with the yellow line pulleys. I edited the “E” so that it emphasized how long a tiring day can feel and added the message at the gaps in the seats as if they were passengers to highlight the theme of taking care of yourself.

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Thank you!

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My name is Near L. I’m in 10th grade. I’m from Thailand, I moved here when I was 2. I live in Northgate. I’ve taken art classes in school, including media literacy in middle school. I was always given the position as “Camera Holder” instead of taking a shot at directing, however I paid attention to the techniques that they directed me and the actors to do and built off of them when I had the chance to have creative freedom in single person projects. My favorite kinds of photos to take are nature and wildlife photography. What brought me to them was wildlife documentaries my grandparents put on the TV as a kid. At first, I thought they were boring and wanted to watch Ben 10, but then I gave it a chance and became captivated with the cinematography. Frans Lanting is a big inspiration for me. I like how his photos are an effort at promoting an understanding of the Earth. A technique he uses that I especially like is conveying his photos through the eyes of animals.

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My movie poster begins with a boy who wants to follow his childhood dream of becoming a pilot but feels obligated to go down a different career path in gratitude for the sacrifice his parents made in their journey to secure a better life for him in a new country.Throughout the movie, he ends up diving deeper than just careers and begins to search for his purpose. He has only 2 months until the end of his highschool graduation and begins to take on all these events and internships in order to find what he really wants but still deals with that internal struggle as he feels that the only way to repay a sacrifice so big is to sacrifice his own life and dreams. The movie is called “A Boy’s Purpose” The dandelion represents wishes as the boy’s childhood self throws a paper plane through the dandelion and out of it comes an actual airplane.

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My name is Near L. I’m in 10th grade. What led me to the photography world was watching David Attenborough wildlife documentaries when I was growing up. I would imagine myself as the person taking the shots and constantly annoy my siblings by pausing the screen to analyze each shot I found interesting. 

The change I want to express through my photos is about protecting nature so David Attenborough can keep making films, but also because it’s good too.

In my first photo, I narrowed it down to protecting trees, the lungs of our land. Some context behind the photo is the transit station used to have lots of trees around it, but lots of them were cut down and replaced with an obsessive amount of city lights. The wavy streaks of the lights was a cool accident when I was playing around with the lighting of the camera settings. I kept it because it distorted around the trees, mimicking the situation.

For my second photo, it is about the wildlife of nature. Some important elements are the floss shaped like a fish, the fact that it’s plastic, and the crow itself is the subject taken. The crow, Monty, and I are close, so I knew he was smart enough to not actually eat the floss but pose with it, attracted by the banana bread I placed behind it. I wanted to show how different it was from when birds would eat their natural foods but now, they unknowingly digest litter and plastic. It would’ve been better if I used a bird that actually ate fish, but this was the only bird I knew was at ease with me so I went with that rather than spend countless hours with a random seagull that could possibly swallow the floss. What drew me to create this photograph was seeing all the plastic and trash at my bus stop everyday, because there’s so much wildlife that’s affected by it that you wouldn’t notice unless you stop and really look around and listen around the trees and bushes and cracks and crevices of the bus stop.

#ProtectMonty 

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