Picture Postcards

Some weeks ago Nancy got the idea of producing some postcards showing our parish, as a small fundraiser. She says she really likes my photos, some of which can be seen in our Image Gallery -- just about all the rest on the website are mine also.

I've been taking digital photos for a decade now, ever since I was given my first digital camera (I now use #3 and #4), so there are quite a lot of photos to draw on. Nancy initially chose a couple for the cards, one of the front doors with rhodies in bloom and another of the Nave, though we took some additional Nave photos after the Easter service, this time using a ladder for additional angles. (Nancy has a good sense for composition.) As is typical, the photos were flawed in one fashion or another so it took some effort to make them presentable (typical operations: rotate, crop, adjust brightness and color).

Then a couple of weeks ago she looked at the banner on the website and thought of putting something like that on a "panoramic" postcard (8 inches by 4 inches). Fine -- but I have been planning to update that banner as it shows folks whom we've not seen in a while, and there are a few other things that have changed. (One photo goes back to 2003, taken with #1.)

It took a bit more time than I anticipated to go through this collection and find a set of (ultimately) nine photos that illustrate various aspects of St. Bartholomew's and stitch them together. Difficult choices, some difficult editing especially with low-light photos. But at least the "rotate" processing will become less frequent because I just discovered my inexpensive tripod isn't quite as cheap as I thought -- it just had a element not fully tightened which caused it to be 1-1/2 degrees off vertical.

I don't know what Blogger will do with this reduced image, but here's the card: