March 30 response
As someone who is very much interested in photography but has not had a lot of experience working with Photoshop, I found Katrin Eismann’s Photoshop – Restoration and Retouching very helpful for those who wish to pursue the mastery of photo editing. Because Photoshop is such a memory hog, I have until now really only used Picassa (Google’s free photo editing program), which has the bare minimum for editing. The recreation of pictures is fascinating, and it’s strange to think how much of what we think is real has been added into photos. Eismann’s book makes me weary of photo editing for historical purposes, because we as historians rely so much on physical evidence to help support our claims. With these tools anyone can manipulate an image to speak a different truth or reality, which is both intriguing and frightening at the same time. So much of the topic that I am dealing with is spatial and involves visualization with regard to understanding where the Berlin Wall used to be situated, and I have so many photographs that I want to include on the site. I especially found her portion on working with overexposed images informative because many of my pictures where taken during the daytime in the heat of the June Berlin sun and cast shadows in the “wrong” spots. Breaking down the photos into different layers is a constructive way to look at each feature and deal with the issues tactfully. Also, I am a huge fan of black and white photography, but I agree with Eismann in its discretionary use.
I found last week’s introduction to Photoshop helpful, and I am still playing around with the different fonts and colors to see exactly how I want my logo to be. Critiquing Trevor’s site was a helpful exercise and forced me to look more at the rationale behind the design of my site. I spent a lot of time this weekend trying out the different public themes on WordPress, but am still most pleased by the Ocular Professor Theme. I am still trying to find out how to tweak the layout quite a bit to suit my site’s needs, including moving the big wide calendar from the bottom portion of the page to somewhere on the righthand side, or completely erased from the page. I want to make sure my site looks more like a site than a blog, although I do want to include the blog function for visitor reflections on my site.
