Cathedral Of Learning - A New Way To Display

I have previously posted my photographs of the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh. I recently saw an idea which I thought I could adapt very well to my Cathedral series, since the photos already had been processed to have a ‘vintage’ look. The concept was to make the images appear as if they were photographic plates in an antique book.

In order to do this, I needed an ‘antique’ background. I have an old high school graduation photo of my mother, the kind from the 1940s that had hand painting on top of the the photo, and it was in an old paper frame that it was falling out of, having been taped in with now ancient tape. So I took the frame and decided to scan it. It was larger than the bed of my flatbed scanner, so I had to scan the frame in four parts: left upper, right upper, left lower, and right lower and then assemble the pieces in Photoshop. The frame was symmetric all around and a plate in a book would be asymmetric with more blank space at the bottom, so I used Photoshop to extend the frame. I also had to make a portion of the frame around where the photo was to be inserted into a smart object so that I could transform it; changing the window size in order to fit the various cropped photos that I was going to put inside.

After making some adjustments with curves to the frame and applying a bit more vignette and a subtle texture to the photo this is what I came up with.

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Plate 1 - Cathedral Of Learning © Howard Grill

I think this type of presentation might work nicely for an eBook. At some point I will very likely put one together.

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