DLP Week 18: The Fabric of Our Lives...

I seem to be falling a bit behind with my documented life project...life (and all new windows installed in our house) have side tracked me this week. The Documented Life Project prompt for week 18 was to use fabric and the quote was a phrase...'the fabric of your life'.

This is one of my favourite photos of my four older brothers and I, taken over fifty years ago (gasp!). I had tucked it into the front cover of my DLP journal a few months ago, knowing that I wanted to use it once the right prompt came up. Keeping to the old family photo idea, I printed out some other favourite shots and used the film strip washi tape to present them. I just love that washi tape!

Vintage...

Bonnie's challenge this week for Photo Art Friday was the word 'vintage'.  Well, after the fabulous gift I recently received there is no shortage of wonderful images to play with for this challenge!

Mouse over photo to see the 'before' image.

I chose this photo of my Dad.  It's funny to see a cigarette in his hand. He quit smoking when I was a baby so I have no memory of him as a smoker.

As you can see when you mouse over to see the original image, I cropped it to bring my father closer.  While still in Lightroom, I created a sepia version of the image.  I then took both the original cropped image and the sepia version into Photoshop Elements when I layer the sepia one over the other.  I kept it at 'normal' blend mode, but reduced the opacity to about 65% to allow some of the original colour to come back.

I know any snapshots from back then would have had a white frame around them, something that of course is missing from the digitized slides, so I brought in a vintage frame that I have in my files (sorry, I can't remember where it's from, but you'll be able to find lots such things by Googling it). I placed the photo into the frame and called it done!

Update:  I Googled 'free vintage frames for photoshop' and found this frame with the old vintage corners and the scalloped edge at this site.  There are so many wonderful 'freebies' out there! How cool is that!

Connecting With My Past

This week, I got a small parcel in the mail.  It's always exciting to get unexpected surprises, but this turned out to be the best present I may have ever received.  You see, the package contained CDs of digitized images of all of my Dad's old slides.  It turns out that my brother Wolfgang, the handsome little fellow with the vest on, had taken the many boxes of slides (almost 3,000 images) and scanned them into his computer, over the period of several weeks, so that he could digitize all of our family images and then he sent a set of the disks to each of his sibs.

The timing is fabulous since as you may know from recent posts, I have just started using Lightroom and I'm in the process of organizing all of my images.  I can't tell you how thrilled I am to have all of these images, dating back to the late 50s, of my brothers and I growing up. The pictures date back to shortly after my parents and three oldest brothers arrived from Germany, through to the mid 80s.

And so this week, I'm taking a trip down memory lane, to a shot of my four brothers with me, their baby sister.  Yes, I'm the youngest of five and the only girl.  And to make life even more interesting, when I was four my aunt and my cousin Karl came to live with us so from that point on I essentially had five older brothers, two moms and my dad!

I'm not sure what the occasion is in this picture...perhaps there wasn't one, because I know that Mom would have us dress up for family photos now and then 'just because'.

I didn't have to do much to get that vintage feel in these images LOL.  I added a layer of Kim Klassen's 'Daisy' texture (from her new Downton Abbey Collection) at soft light, using a 75% opacity, and then brushed most of that off of our faces, leaving a soft vignette around the outside of the image.  I also decided to add the vintage frame to the image since the slides, and therefore the digital images, were missing that.

In this second image, probably taken about a year later, we have the five of us again.  This may actually be my favourite picture of the five of us!  Again I added a bit of a texture (Isobel, from the same collection).  As with the other image, I used a soft light blend mode and removed most of the texture from our faces before adding the frame.

It's going to take me some time to get through all of these photos and add keywords, etc. but as I'm sure you can imagine, it is going to be a labour of love!

Linking up with Our World Tuesday, Texture Tuesday, Sweet Shot Tuesday and Photo Art Friday.