The polished concrete floor at our feet was showing signs of being walked all over and taken for granted. Bob Keon commented to me about its sad appearance. But I saw something heavenly.
Bob and I were attending a reception at St. Mary’s Church, Cochrane. He wondered what possible beauty I could be seeing in that blotchy two-square-metre section of speckled aggregate and cement.
Oh, I see beautiful clouds on a lazy summer afternoon, I told him.
I took a photo of that part of the floor and set about proving it.
When I got home, I downloaded the photo and began processing it in Photoshop Elements. In fact, I was so intrigued by what was emerging before my eyes, I thought of another photo I had in my files and invited it to join the fun.
Here’s what I did (see images):
Image 1: the unretouched photo of floor. Notice its blotchy, speckly appearance.
Image 2: I applied Gaussian blur to the photo to eliminate the speckles. Then I adjusted brightness and contrast, and recoloured the concrete blue. Yup, there it was, the very kind of altocumulus clouds I’d imagined!
Image 3: That scene deserved a bird, however. So I called up a photo I’d taken of a crow atop the bell tower cross at St. Mary’s last year.
Image 4: Adjusting the size of the crow and cross photo, I selected just the crow and cross and copied them onto the concrete clouds image, with this as the final result.
So, yes, Bob, with the eyes of my imagination, I really did see something heavenly in that blotchy section of concrete floor.
As the late U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy so famously paraphrased George Bernard Shaw: “Some people see things as they are and say, ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were and say, Why not?”
© 2016 Warren Harbeck
www.coffeewithwarren.com
