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"It all started back in the mid-'70s with my family's Kodak Instamatic and a neighbor's crusty old darkroom chemicals from the 1940s," Mike Bedford explains on his website. Add a decade of newpaper photojournalism experience, a healthy dose of freelance photography and a helping of commerical work, and you have a world-class photographer whose work appears on numerous CDs and Web sites. Bedford now works at Cal State Fullerton as an Instructional Support Technician. He also shares with students his expertise in digital imaging, graphics and
traditional photography.
Bedford got his first taste of digital imaging while he attended Ambassador University in [Texas] in the mid-'80s. As an experiment, the campus newspaper scanned one of his news images. "It ran in the paper full of blocky pixels, but it was there," Bedford recalls. "The idea that digital imaging could replace my beloved darkroom was actually quite unsettling, but now I feel just the opposite. I see the possibilities and efficiencies that digital imaging offers as the most fantastic thing to come along for photographers."
At his job, Bedford teaches students a variety of software programs. With his own photography, Canvas is the one he uses most often. "It's much simpler for the students to do their various projects in one application, such as Canvas, instead of banging back and forth fighting with import/export and file conversions," he explains. "This approach actually makes learning the concepts of desktop publishing, illustration and digital imaging easier because you can experiment and explore options in one place, in one document."
One of Bedford's techniques includes combining new and old images of the same location. After scanning, spotting, sharpening and color correcting, Bedford uses Canvas' freeform effect along with push-and-pull resizing to overlay the two images and match them up as closely as possible. The Transparency slider allows Bedford to see through the top photo while adjusting it to match the bottom image.
Bedford recently completed a project called Retro Metro in which he combined new and historic photos in Canvas. The project began when he acquired some historical architectural images from the Nashville Public Library and Tennessee State Library and Archives. He then established the exact location where the older photos were taken and shot new photos of thoselocations from the same angles at approximately the same time of day. Next, Bedford clicked and held the sprite layer icon in the tools palette. Afterwards, using the vector transparency tools, he placed an editable mask on the selected image, seamlessly superimposing the old image over the new.
Bedford says gradient masks are the quickest and simpliest means of achieving a faded effect and leave plenty of room for experimentation. To do this, he applies a sprite layer to a black-and-white photo (top layer), selects the gradient tool and draws a line across the image until he achieves the effect he wants.
Will Bedford ever return to the darkroom? "After 20-plus years of sloshing in wet trays, I have had my fill," he contends.