You’d think that as long as I’ve been in the photo biz, I would have settled into a particular style or genre in my work. Not so, apparently. I think my next blog will address this. But for now, here’s something new I’ve been working on.

With my affection for history and the fact that I live a block-and-a-half from Lake Erie, I took off on a suggestion from my astute business partner that I should “do some boat photos.” Full disclosure: this was purely a capital pursuit.

So I started cruising the Library of Congress online photo catalog, searching under various keywords. Yacht seemed to work the best. I picked out about a dozen from 1895 - 1905 and downloaded them. The native file size they have is huge (22 x 28 inches at 300dpi).

I picked one to work on, converted it from grayscale to RGB and began to color it in Photoshop. I have done this a bit before, but not on as large a scale. My aim was not to make it look present day, but more like the hand-colored photos from that era.

When it was completed I showed a thumbnail to my rep. She showed it to some folks and told me a week later that they wanted four more at 20 x 24 for a new project she was working on. They will go in a new building downtown.

I learned a few new tricks, improved my skills and more importantly, gained confidence in my abilities. Which puts me in a great position the next time Al throws me a challenge.

Here are two samples the Ariel, above, and the Vencedor, below.