Creative use of PhotoShop Can Add Poignancy to People Photos
©Bert Gildart: In recent years, this has become one of my favorite images, recalling for me a wonderful trip to Nova Scotia. Janie and I were gathering material for a story about the Evangeline Trail, something I had become quite passionate about over the years.
Using Photoshop I resized the moon, which had been present, then positioned it where I thought it would work best to complement this Graveyard Walk.
Shortly after I graduated from college I taught English and introduced my students to Longfellow’s poem entitled Evangeline. Famous narrators of the time had recited the poem and it was available in school catalogues. Though I can’t remember the narrator’s name for sure (could it have been Basil Rathbone?), I do remember the kids loved the deep Orson Wells-type voice the speaker projected.
The poem follows an Acadian girl named Evangeline and her search for her lost love Gabriel, set during the time of the “Great Upheaval.”
Remember?
This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss and in garment green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld with voices sad and prophetic…
The poem details the expulsion of the French Acadians from Nova Scotia and that’s where this graveyard walk came in.
PHOTOSHOP
Here, in this image, Alan Melanson is conducting a walk that describes the hardships endured by the Acadians and explained how so many died. I used a single strobe and then later added a moon in Photoshop.
The moon was there that night, just not in the right place–and so I manipulated it a bit, then positioned it. I did so by photographing the moon separately. Then I enlarged it slightly, created two layers, changed the moon from a full moon to a quarter moon, then positioned it where I thought it would work best.
I believe the photo worked well because Melanson (an Acadian descendent) so thoroughly projects his ancestry, and because of the moon, which I hope added a sense of the poetic.
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December 6th, 2008 at 9:33 am
There really is no need to tell everyone about your fake photo’s, we have come to expect it out of you. As any amateur astronomer would know, the shadow of the earth would be on the other side of the moon! Unless you were looking in a mirror, this picture is backwards.
December 6th, 2008 at 9:48 am
Ah, what can you expect from family members? The question, however, is whether or not he is correct. If he is, then the solution of course is to go back to PhotoShop, flip the entire image so the manipulation is really done up right. Maybe that will satisfy the Socratic crank in this family. In the meantime, I’ll look into his assertion about mirror images, and be searching as well for the poison administered to this Medieval “Gadfly” when he had become too much of a nuisance.