Many people have somewhere that’s their home away from home; it may be their best friend’s house, the vacation they go on every summer, some even consider college the home away from home. My home away from home is a summer camp called Camp Christopher. I camped there for 6 years and I now work there as a camp counselor, which is a dream for most campers, but I get to live that dream. I tried to communicate the feeling of camp as well as I could. The beauty and togetherness of camp are the two things that make it so amazing. It’s a full week of being outside in the woods without phones, singing songs, and making lasting friendships. It’s the campfires that the entire camp attends to say hello and to say goodnight, but never goodbye. The skies are my favorite part of being outside all day, it’s always pretty. Whether it’s rained all day or the sun is relentless, it’s always pretty. Especially at night because unlike in Cleveland, you can actually see the stars clearly. I didn’t include a picture of those because that’s something I’ll always keep to myself and my campers.

I used mainly the Layer Mask Essentials unit to show me how to make this collage. My critiques to myself are that I probably should’ve used a bigger canvas so that I could’ve expanded the sky that is underneath the sun rays, and also been able to show more of that, as well as the whole image looks darker than I would have liked and I should work on changing that. All of the photos were taken by me. I do think if I use a bigger canvas for the final draft, I can play around with the sizes more as well as the colors and it could make all the difference. Using Photoshop, I used “Create New” to make a custom canvas size, then using Bridge I added all 5 photos to Photoshop before adding all of them to the custom canvas as layers. For each layer I made sure the entire photo was shown by using Transform>Scale. Then after much confusion, I finally used Layer>Layer Mask>Reveal All, then used the brush tool to help blend them together.