Created during the turmoil of the COVID-19 pandemic, this project represents my desire to escape from the uncertainty and anxiety caused by the pandemic. In the middle of a shelter-in-place order, with nowhere to go, this project was a means of escape that allowed me to entertain the idea of traveling to a fantasy land. This series of three images follows a loose story of traveling through a magic portal into the past and creating a lighthearted narrative in which humans and dinosaurs coexist and interact together—walking through a doorway through which one sees a land populated by dinosaurs, racing with pterodactyls, and even keeping a velociraptor as a pet. The title was inspired by a show I would watch as a child called “Dragon Tales,” in which the two main characters are children who travel to a fantasy land populated with dragons by saying the spell, “I wish, I wish, with all my heart, to fly with dragons in a land apart.” I was reminded of the show while creating these composites, as it is a similar concept of escaping reality for a while to have fun and be carefree in a different land, perhaps a land where there are no humans to cause harm to the planet and to each other.

There were several complications during this assignment, first of which was the struggle to settle on a topic amidst the turmoil. Secondly, and more importantly, was the inability to travel to take photographs due to lockdown. Forced to work with images I already had and what I could find online via stock images/public domain, I have issues of images with low resolution being composited with images of higher resolution, which reduces the "smooth" look required to make the images look more "realistic." In the future, when the global situation is better, I would love to return to the locations used in these images to rephotograph in higher resolution and remake the project.