Fooling Around With Photos
Steven B. Zwickel
December, 2022
My Cub Scout pack was running a photography contest, so I took my little plastic camera out to see what I could shoot. I had taken black & white photos before, mostly of squirrels and flowers growing in the back yard. I also took my camera with me on a class trip to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens {I was apparently clever enough to write down the names of my classmates so now, some 50+ years later, I know who they were!}.
I walked two short blocks from my house without taking a picture. At the intersection I saw fire engines in front of the corner gas station, so I crossed the street (eagerly and carefully waiting for the light to turn green) to see what was going on. Some gas had spilled on the pavement and caught fire. I raised my camera and took two photos of the firefighters at work. One of these won the contest. My prize was a real camera with a flash (meaning I could now take photos indoors). I was hooked on photography.
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| April, 1960 Brooklyn - Fire at Texaco station |
Over the years I graduated to more sophisticated cameras and my photos got a little better. Twenty years after I took the photo of the fire, I spent a week in Portugal doing nothing but taking pictures. By the end of the week, I was able to think of myself as a real photographer. I took lots of photos, some of which were pretty enough, and meaningful enough, to enlarge and hang on the wall.
A few years later I got my hands on an Apple computer. I was able to create some interesting graphics, but I never used it with photos.
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| Bitmap graphic made with Apple II |
And then I learned to use Aldus [now Adobe] Photoshop. It was great fun altering photos and playing with the different tools. Here are some examples of things I did (when I should have been working). Most of the time, I used my own face to re-create other images. |
| 1995 Photoshop: 'Rock 'n' Roll Grandpa' Steve as Elvis |
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I joined the Supremes in 2003 with a little help from Photoshop |
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I put my face in a photo of a 1893 base-ball team |
Admiral Steven
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Photo to pencil sketch
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| Old time baseball card |
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2009 from photo I took in China |
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| 2009 Bonsai photo from Japan |
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| In honor of 50 years after the 'Summer of Love' |
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| Where's my hair? |
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| Bobblehead |
I also played with photos to create interesting covers for the student handbooks used while I taught communication courses.
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| Me, the Beatles |
And I doctored photos and made parodies, sometimes using my dog as a model:
Finally, I took a perfectly good picture by artist Jim Clements and made it all about me:
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| Now this ole cowboy is gonna ride off into the sunset! |
Sincere apologies to all the artists whose work I mucked up, but it was all in fun.
