I made some drastic changes between my collage draft and this final piece, if you’d like to see the draft again you can go here. The only two pieces of the first draft that made it into the original are the picture in the upper-left and the text; this is partially because many images in the first draft were impermissible and partially because I felt these pictures told a better story.
One theme that came up in most critique comments on my first draft is that I should add a more personal feel to it. I thought this was a great idea and ran with it. Instead of a picture of myself I thought a picture of my younger brother playing baseball this past summer was even better.
This past summer my brother joined a select baseball team and played in tournaments all over the state; I had the privilege to travel with him most of the time and watch games all summer. Honestly I’ve never been more happy or proud in my life, getting to watch him succeed almost daily at the sport I dedicate so much time to. I felt it was only appropriate to use the picture I took of him this summer in Puyallup as the background to my final collage.
The final three pictures, which I’ll go in depth about, are Mariners related. I believe the contrast between 14U baseball and major league baseball is striking, but at the same time I feel it helps convey my message. I follow the Mariners and love watching them play and although my brother is only 14 and the talent level is much lower, I still love watching him play. Baseball, to me, is the perfect game.
The picture in the upper-left was taken by me just before this years Apple Cup in Seattle. My dad’s company threw a pre-game party for some of their customers and I got to go as well. The best part was getting to see a nearly empty Safeco, it was completely different than I had ever seen it before, quite peaceful. I applied a poster edge filter and box blur to the photo to give it an interesting look. Honestly I spent about two days deciding on whether or not this picture should be in color or black and white, eventually settling on color just before I posted this.
In the middle is Felix Hernandez, the Mariners centerpiece player. I got the picture from Flickr and cutout Felix from the background using the magnetic lasso tool. King Felix is my favorite Mariner and he’s honestly one of the only reasons I have hope in the teams future.
The bottom-left is quite meaningful to most Mariners fans; this is a picture (also taken from Flickr) taken of a Dave Niehaus memorial setup outside the home plate gate to Safeco. When the city of Seattle lost Dave, the voice of the Mariners, last year the fan base took it hard. Dave had been with us since the beginning and was one of the best in the business. Despite having never met the man, I loved him and it hurt to lose him. I used a low light blend on the picture and blurred the edges to make it fade into the background picture.
It’s truly hard not to be romantic about baseball.
