Dad's Grade 8 Graduation (Posterized)

Dad's Grade 8 Graduation (PSTR), a photo by randubnick on Flickr.

My dad was born on August 28, so today would have been his birthday. Last night I was looking through some early photos of him that my Aunt Celia gave me after he died. One of my favorites has always been a picture of him holding his eighth grade diploma. (On the back of the photo, someone wrote: Hy Zagon, 8th Grade Graduation, 1932.) This morning, despite the stormy weather, I decided to try to do something with the snapshot. I scanned it into the computer and took a good look. The snapshot was great to start with, but it wasn't straight. And I saw some problems that I hadn't noticed before because I liked the photo so much. There were several people in the background and I didn't necessarily want to include strangers in this picture. There were garbage cans lining the sidewalk, but what was worse, there was garbage strewn along the sidewalk. So I decided to clean up the streets of Brooklyn for my dad. I usually start by straightening the image, but this time I waited because I wanted to preserve as much as of the original as possible. I used a combination of cut-and-paste and digital chalk to cover up the people and the garbage cans. In the process, I had to "invent" part of a facade and rebuild a sidewalk, fence, and curb. This took a while. Then I used color overlays and posterizing to add the color. I am simplifying here because it took a lot of tries to get what I wanted. After that I used iPhoto to straighten and crop, and finally used the iPhoto "retouch" tool to soften some edges. It felt good to spend a little time on this, thinking about this little boy who grew up in Brooklyn, and years later moved to Pueblo, Colorado, where he met my mom, got married, and became my dad.