Every picture tells a story… this one just happens to be of a woman who lived during the Civil War.
Just kidding.
Take your best Civil War era photo. Take a picture of yourself in a very stale pose (like you have never had a picture taken in your life) and then edit it afterwards in some sort of grunge black and white style to make it look old. If you want to be very clever, try and make the enviroment around you fit the Civil War era theme of the photo.
I chose the Civil War Photo assignment because it was another photography based project. When I was in high school, we did some film photography, and the process of developing and learning about how cameras had evolved was very interesting, so I decided to flip the switch and go back a couple centuries with this one.
The Civil War era was the first time that a war and time period had extensively been photographed. There were photographers hired by both sides that travelled to battlefields across the North and South in order to capture the happenings of wartime. The cameras back then needed to have a long shutter speed (the lens stayed open longer) so there was no battle action covered, but pre and post-battle as well as lifestyles were photographed.
For my photograph, I staged a scene in my living room with a tapestry and an antique rocking chair that seems like it could have been from that time period. I took multiple timed photos looking glum and unhappy, as many women’s portraits seemed to look during that time period.
Next, I put the photo into Photoshop and followed the directions of an article on how to make sepia toned photos, I added some graininess, distressed the edges, and ended up with my final product.
