What's Old is New Again

First, the old. I had a client bring in some photos of her now-late husband, taken when he was a young man. A very handsome young man, by the way. One of the pictures was very badly damaged and part of it is missing. Luckily one of the other ones she brought me was intact enough for me to 'steal' his hair from and replace it in this photo restoration.

She hasn't seen these yet but I'd venture a guess that she is going to be very happy with the results. I love PhotoShop!

And, another client brought in a framed panorama picture of Yaquina Bay from 1936, when the bridge was brand new. What a wonderful picture it is, too, with no distortion of any kind. A marvel of photography even today, and it is from 71 years ago. He created his own panorama of the same bay from the very same location in 1980. It was neat to study those images, because those were my stomping grounds back in the early 80s. What he asked of me was to do a new panorama of the bay as it looks today from that very same spot. It is in front of his mother's house, and he is going to be selling that house fairly soon.

So we went tromping out to the point of the bluff where the other pictures were taken - or at least as close as I was going to get, erosion has taken the bluff back a few feet, and I have some issues with height. Anyway, this is what I ended up with after I stitched 4 images together in PhotoShop. Click on it to see more detail. Have I mentioned how much I love PhotoShop?

And for the new... Eric and I shot some family portraits a few weeks ago, and while the client really liked them, they asked if this face could be switched out with that face from another, very similar image... could you fix that hair blowing in the wind, and oh yeah there is some lens flare, could you get rid of that? So I did a fair amount of editing and face/expression switching to get the portrait just right. And my client is very happy with it.

So happy, in fact, that yesterday, Kim from Toledo Florist delivered this beautiful tulip bouquet to me from this client. Have I mentioned how much I love PhotoShop? I just wish I could 'shop myself thinner and younger... ah well. It's kinda fun to create the alternate reality once in a while. But knowing what I know of photo editing, it is really hard to trust photos I see these days, because I see first-hand how much they can be manipulated, and how convincingly as well.

Eric and I are busily planning our trip to Baltimore and DC next month, I've signed up for a full-day photo tour of the memorials and monuments for when Eric is in his conference. I think I'll put together slideshow DVDs of our trip for sale when we get back. I know we're going to have thousands of images, so I might as well put them to good use.