Since We Can't Post Pictures in the Comments Section

Since Florie, Aridog, and I are having a wonderful conversation about photography in the thread about the Peruvian artifacts, I wanted to show a couple of things.

First is an example of cropping. Generally when I work with a photo in Photoshop, my default dimensions are 4x6, since that seems to be the most common print size today. One thing about photography is that print dimensions are not proportional to negatives (or digital camera files). I generally keep that in mind when I take a photo.Since I often cannot get in the best spot to make the entire frame what I want, that isn’t normally a problem.


In this photo, I did not go with the 4x6 proportions; I cropped a little off the right side of the photo. The original has a couple of lamp posts, the cropped version does not.



The important thing here is that I filled the image with what I wanted. I wanted a continuous parade of beach shacks and their colorful doors seem to run on forever. I am often disappointed with the results, but I was not in this case.

Next, I love "then and now" pictures. There is a store in Vancouver that sells old furnishings from hotels. Fay and I went there one day and saw some old photographs. One in particular caught our attention.



This is a photo of downtown Vancouver from Stanley Park, looking across the Vancouver Rowing Club. Taken in 1930, this print is about 26x32 and mounted in a simple frame. We bought a copy of the picture (they had dozens). One Sunday afternoon, we went to Stanley Park with our digital camera and took a new picture of the same view. (We were actually about fifty feet north of the original site, as trees had grown so high that all you would not have seen anything. You can see part of a tree on the right side of the picture.)



Using Photoshop, I turned the photo into black and white. I shaved off a little, perhaps, to get the same dimensions as the original, and had a professional print made. I was happy to find that a print made from our little point-and-shoot digital camera could make a print that large and still be crystal-clear. Maybe someone with better eyes can see compression artifacts, but I am happy with it. We bought another copy of the original picture so that we could have a matching frame. The original is at the top of the stairs, the new print is mounted over the stairs on the opposite wall.

UPDATE! UPDATE! WE HAVE AN UPDATE!

Fay found pictures of the two large buildings in the "then" photo.



This is the Hotel Vancouver, the large building on the right side in the "then" photo.



This is the Marine Building. Both of these buildings are in the beautiful Art Deco style -- built in a time when buildings had style.