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| [Note Guidelines] Photographer's Note |
I was walking along the Rue de la Gauchetierre in Montreal, heading back my hotel, when I saw an area that looked like a park at first, but then I noticed the remains of walls that had been demolished. At the back of the ruins, the ground sloped precipitously upward, and I could see St. Patrick's Basilica at the top of the hill.
A sign noted that these were the remains of the Saint Bridget's Asylum and Night Refuge. The four-story building was built in 1867, and was at first used as a home for the elderly and the homeless, then later as a shelter for battered women and as a soup kitchen for the hungry. In 1975, the building was condemned and torn down.
When I looked up toward the basilica, I saw a great deal of graffiti on the low wall at the top of the hill. I started thinking about the differences in attitude and way of life between the people who built St. Bridget's Asylum, and those who tagged the walls, so I took this picture.
It was late in the afternoon, and overcast, and there's not a lot of color in Montreal in April (as far as live vegetation, etc.) so the image came out fairly colorless.
I wanted to emphasize the border between the graffiti and the church, and still keep a fairly realistic-looking image, so I selected the wall and everything below it, and used Photoshop's Ink Outlines filter to punch up the wall and the hillside. I then inverted the selection, so I could work on the basilica. I wanted to keep the look of the church (which was very gray and flat in the original image) in a single tonal range (and had decided on green because of some of the hints of green already in the gray stone), so I played with a number of Photoshop's color tools, finally settling on the Color Balance tool. I adjusted the shadows, midtones and highlights separately, leaning toward the positive side of the green and blue palettes, and on the negative side of the red palettes for everything but the highlights. On that palette I shifted back toward the red a little. Then I sharpened the image, resized it, saved and uploaded it. |
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