#1 November 12th, 2010 02:44 AM

ashmedi

Member

Is This The First Photo Chop in History ??

I don't know if it is or not, but this is another photo currently hanging in the Dining Room as part of a Rogues Gallery. This photo was taken in February 1892 in Listowel Ontario Canada and was probably manually photo chopped within months, educated guess only as even I wasn't old enough to witness the event.

The photo has signifigance to my wife as it a photo of her grandmother and 10 siblings, and has signicance to me as a curiosity and a passable attempt at photo chopping with the only tools available at the time it was originally done.

This is a scanned version of the photo as it is and as it was when we inheirited it in the early 1980's.
Clicking on the photo takes you to a series of scans or Paintshop images showing a WIP as I attempt to recreate the photo as it originally existed before it was modified and I am planning to digitally redo the photo chop assuming my last good eye lasts long enough to complete the task

If you go to Webshots there are captions below each of the 6 scans or Paintshop images indicating what was done at that stage of my remakes.

The basic plot is that my wifes Great Grandfather died at a youn age and this photo was taken shortly after his funeral as a memorial tribute of and by the siblings and given to my wifes Great Grandmother.
If you haven't noticed the photo chop yet, it is 2 of the siblings in the back row. I always knew there was something strange about this photo but I may have looked it for months before finally clueing in and noticing exactly what was wrong.
The girl in the back row, 3rd from the left, and facing the wrong way, was gravely ill at the time of the photo, and she passed away within weeks of the photo being taken, and because of her illness, was not able to be present.
The guy in the back row, 3rd from the right, the one with the big head and facing the wrong way, was roughly 1500 miles away out on the Canadian Prairies when the photo was taken, and he could not make it back. In 1892 the only modes of transport inside Canad were by horse or by train, one very slow, and one very expensive.

It is unknown who actually created the photo chop or precisely when.

My WIP to render an "Original" image and a remastered "Fake" have gotten to the point of removing the addis and fixing the bodies of 3 siblings and redoing the wall or background.  My remastered "Original" is print ready and will print an exact clean version in 8x10.
I don't know how the original artist attached the heads to the photo, they are still flat and tight to the original image, and I often wonder if the actual photo of the 9 siblings actually present on that date was deliberately posed to allow somebody to make the ultimate photo chop easier and more realistic

Link to the Webshots album titled Before and After 04

http://family.webshots.com/photo/287109 … 4242RBSfLg

Image number #3 in the set is my original attempt at remastering. It was attempted in 1998 using primitive hardware, software, and skills ... At that time I was naive enough to believe I could print a good 8x10 from a screen sized, 800x600, image ... My first attemp was considered to come out as a passable failure

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Ashmedi is an ancient demon of rage and lust.
Rage is not my thing, but I must admit to committing my favorite of the 7 deadly sins for most of the contributors