Artist Biography
My name is Elias Woolsey, I am a Photo Major from Nashville, Tennessee. Throughout my time atEndicott College, I wasnt quite sure what area of photography I wanted to pursue until the summer after mySophmore year when I looked up at the sky on a clear night and was able to see the outline of the Milky Way. Iimmediately brought out my camera and started taking long exposures of it and was able to see vivid detail in myphotos of it, and was immediately hooked, and quite frankly havent looked back since.Astrophotography is a hard medium of photography to learn due to its complexity, some of the celestialobjects youre shooting, you cannot even see. Due to this I came to the solution of getting a motorized telescopethat once calibrated will go to wherever I tell it to in the night sky. After taking hundreds of photos of an object,you then have to use computer programs like Siril to get the exposure of all of those images combined byessentially stacking them. Astrophotography is something that I wish to continue to improve upon, I know imnowhere near done learning about my capabilities.
Thesis Abstract
Through the creation of my senior capstone project, Im using my creative expression to bring light tothe unseen bodies in the night sky. These distant celestial objects and wide range of phenomena often gounnoticed by the naked human eye due to things such as light pollution. By blending my ability to capturephotos with science and technology, im able to translate the unseen to the seen, in the process sometimesshowing people images they didnt even know existed. Through my installation for capstone, I wish to capturethe wow factor of these distant objects and leave a lasting impression.The core of my project is gain appreciation and awareness, a chance to stop and think about somethingyou might have never thought about. Space holds a profound signicance to our understanding of existence andhow we came to be. I only wish to bring more awareness to that.