If you have ever had to take a group picture of friends or family members, you know that the most difficult part of getting a good picture is not your composition, how well you know your camera, how good the light is, or any of these technical details. The biggest challenge is to get a picture in which everyone's eyes are open, everyone is looking at the camera (with a semi-intelligent expression), and where no one's face is half hidden behind aunt Mary's large hairdo!
Now imagine taking a family picture with almost 250 of your closest relatives in it. On top of that, you have to shoot this picture across Locust Street in the middle of the day, with several hundred spectators crowding around you. This begins to give you an idea how challenging it is to take the JMC freshman class group picture every year.
As hard as we tried to make sure that every one of the entering freshman was looking at the camera and that no one was hiding behind their classmates, and as loudly as we screamed to make sure we had all 234 students in the picture, this is what happened: Several students had their eyes closed or were looking to the side, a couple of people were partially covered by a classmate, and one student was absent all together. In addition, there were bike racks, cables and pieces of tape on the sidewalk in the foreground, and the tree that nicely framed the picture on the right side was absent on the left--making the whole picture look lopsided.
After the medium-format color negatives were scanned, the first thing we did was mask out the tree, flip it horizontally, and paste it in onto the left side of the picture. In order to make the other side look a little different, some of the knots on the trunk and the branches were altered. Then, the bike racks, the cables, and other imperfections on the sidewalk were removed and cleaned up.
Next we looked for closed eyes and turned or partially covered faces. Since we had taken several shots of the group, we were able to "steal" replacement eyes and faces from the other negatives and paste them in where needed. The final trick was to include a student who, for some reason, was not in the group shot at all. We know that he was at the White Coat Ceremony but, after we took the group shot, his mother came over to tell us that her son was not in the picture. Fortunately, we had taken some candid shots of him during the ceremony. One of those that matched the lighting of the group shot was selected, his face and part of his upper body were masked out, and this was copied and then pasted into the group picture. A small gap among the students in the top row proved to be the perfect spot for our "missing" freshman.
So here we are. A group of about 250 people in a single shot (actually, composed of 11 separate layers) where, as much as possible, we have no blinkers or partially visible students. You'll probably never look at a large-group picture the same way again!
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