Monday, March 2, 2009

Photoshop and Dad.....


I took an extensive class on how to use Photoshop, a computer program that allows you to create better photos, designs, web pages, and special effects to pictures. It is far more complicated than that description but I hope you get the idea. At the same time I was taking the class, I had inherited a large box of photos that my Dad had sent home to Mom during WW 2. Men over there had polaroids and regular cameras. A large group of these photos are polaroids but some are regular developed prints. My Dad had said that one of his friends brought chemicals and would develop at night out in the field. Anyway, the pictures that you see here are ones that took place before my dad went to the front line of the Battle of the Bulge. He was first shipped into Belgium before assignment to the front, all the pictures remind you of farm boys visiting Europe on vacation. They really didn't know what was yet to come in their lives.
The neat thing about photoshop is that you can take a scanned picture that looks like nothing and adjust it's brightness and contrast and turn it into a good photo. The one of Notre Dame was a very dark picture and by the time I had work on it you could even see the lion sculpture in the front of the plaza in front of the building. I have many photographs that are in bad condition that I have found are really good photos once I play with them on the photoshop program. The train photo as well as the boat one are pictures of things that were damaged by the bombing in the area before he arrived there. I have a lot of pictures of broken bridges and German tanks in the pile. Many times when my Dad sent these home, he would have written a description on the back using a fountain pen. Ball point pens hadn't been invented yet. I don't see how he had fountain pens but the barracks they were in, which was like a Belgium hotel, probably had them.
The design I made was one of my final projects that I was required to make. I later turned it into a book cover. Time to go to bed now. I will post different war photos along the way that I think might be interesting to you. Thanks for reading....

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