Whilst I continue to struggle to find the time and people I need to complete Part 2, I’ve been getting ahead and planning for Parts 3 and 4 in the hope of completing them quickly and making up lost time.
Browsing through Part 4 I noticed the projects involving montages. As I have been working a lot with layers in PS I decided to go back to some earlier shots I took of old boxcars at Dungeness, which I’d started to play round with using as frames.
The state of the boxcar and the surroundings bring to mind subjects of industrial decline and decay. One of my earliest memories of industrial decline is the miners strike back in ’84/’85, so I went looking on line for the newspapers of the day.
To create the image I followed these steps:
- Created solid background layer colours bright blue.
- Added the boxcar photograph as a layer, then used the background eraser to clear the ‘panes’. The bright blue background helped highlight exactly what was being removed. initially I cleared large areas using a solid round brush, then switched to smaller textured brushes to blend in the edges.
- Placed each ‘cutting’ on a separate layer.
- Arranged the cuttings on each layer until I had them where I wanted, and set the blending mode to Darker Colour – I tried them all to see what worked best.
- Further blended some of the cuttings using a very soft textured eraser brush, just to get rid of some harsh lines.
- After saving the PSD file with all the layers, the image has been flattened and slightly desaturated before saving as a JPEG.
M W Photography 
Fantastic Mike.
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Good work Mike, I certainly remember the the miner’s strike! Excellent Photoshop skills.
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A really superb idea and image, and tutorial as well. Thank you. A little further round the coast from Dungeness is the site of the former Kent Coalfield and Betteshanger Park with a developing mining developing mining Museum. This is collecting oral and other history of 100 years of mining in Kent, including the strikes of 1984/5. You may be interested, and could repeat the exercise with local newspaper cuttings from the strike.
I was a district nurse for the coalfield at the time of the strike and maintain my connection as an elected governor for our local hospital Trust for the Dover constituency. We are hopeful that the Park will be part of the continuing regeneration for the area. Nobody grieves the awful conditions those working underground experienced, together with the resultant ill health, but the loss of the sense of strong community is keenly felt, alongside a good deal of deprivation.
I am also participating in a research project about the strike funded by the Arts Council.
Further information may be found at:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteshanger-Park
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/history/research/-grants/women-Miners-strike
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That’s really interesting thanks Sarah! Betteshangar Park is a great achievement, good to something so valuable being created. If only such efforts had been made to create viable replacements for the coal mining industries and their communities 30-odd years ago.
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Great image Mike. I really the colour harmony.
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Thanks Chris. I adjusted the colours using a set of plugins that can be downloaded and used in Photoshop called the ‘NIK Collection’. For various reasons these have in the past varied from being very expensive, to entirely free (when I got them, yay!) to today when they’re $50 until the end of June, then $69. There’s a vast range of filters and a few pre-defined ‘recipies’, details here: https://nikcollection.dxo.com/
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