Artist Bio
McKenna Shearing is a senior at Allendale Columbia School. She’s from the Rochester area and loves traveling and outdoor adventures with her friends. McKenna is passionate about photography and has expressed herself this school year through different long exposure and light painting photography techniques and working with Photoshop. McKenna has participated in several Evening of the Arts events at Allendale Columbia School, and this year she created and donated her confetti bowl piece to the Middle School Empty Bowls event to raise money for charity. McKenna’s work has been featured in the RIT “Start Here” exhibition and she has earned regional recognitions from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. McKenna is also a competitive swimmer and will be swimming for St. Bonaventure University next fall while studying health sciences.
Thesis Statement
I’ve always loved photography and experimenting with bright lights and colors. My thesis project explores long exposure photography and light painting, using neon lights against dark backgrounds to create high-quality images that depict the contrast between light and dark tones. I want to take my images and create a larger variety of color options for screensavers. I’ve researched a lot about Apple’s screensavers and their processing, and I’ve noticed that the options and colors they provide for Apple products are very bland. My research of Apple wallpapers has given me a better understanding of taking clear, high-quality photos intended to appear on devices. I want to provide more color options that could be used as screensavers.
My working process has been super fun, and all of my shooting experiences have been very different while working with a range of light sources. To take my images, I would shoot in a dark space. I shot some images in my garage at home with the lights off against a solid color background, and I also shot in the dark room at school. Everything I photographed was taken with my personal Nikon D3400 camera and edited in Adobe Photoshop. I used the manual bulb shooting mode on my camera to allow myself to have as much flexibility with time durations and light exposure as possible.
Researching Apple’s wallpaper process, and learning more about the artists who take and edit the high-resolution images for the company has taught me a lot, and their tips have helped me improve my Photoshop skills immensely for this project. I’ve also learned a lot about using not only resources around you, but also that using your body to move with the camera creates different motions and movements captured in images. I would continue this type of long exposure and light painting photography in the future. There’s so much freedom with this medium of art, and that there are no limits to what you can use to photograph.
Gallery
All images are long-exposure digital photographs edited with Photoshop.