This post is to help explain part of my then and now project process. As you may note, I haven't posted anything on this blog since 2007 and I'm too lazy to learn how to do this again so I'm just making it up and hoping for the best.
So, I started with an old family photo from 1964 to which I have added a stroke outline. Just to save you from asking, I'm the one in the pink Bobbie Brooks windowpane-check suit with the matching pink blouse. This photo was taken in front of our house and we are standing next to the tiny tree. My parents planted four tiny trees there over time. The first three died and we wouldn't have been surprised to learn that the fourth one had died, too.
As you can see from this photo of the front yard in 2012, the tree did not die. All things considered it might have been better if it did!
This is a print of that first image held in roughly the right place to recreate the original scene but showing more of the current reality around the edges. The idea is to place the old photograph in the current context. I have a number of issues with this as a final project: The sun is glaring off the surface, the contrast in the then and now portions of the scene are more extreme than I want to spend time correcting, alignment is not bad on this one but some of the other images it's really poor.
This is the Photoshop (I use Elements) edition of the combined scene. With the help of Elements I could align the image better, balance the light better, avoid the glare completely. The stroke was added to help define the old and new portions of the image. But it looks odd to me. It looks like two photos in a stack on the table.
So I extracted my hand and put it back in the image. This way I get an photo of me holding up the old photo in front of the actual front yard.
