Initially my thoughts were to do something on environment and forestry since quite a bit of focus was on getting images for the UN competition on year of the forest.
While we were at Port Arthur I spent a lot of time in the Commandant's house taking photos of various rooms and items within the house. I had intended to do a portfolio on the house and figured it would be good to do a travel poster on that aspect of Port Arthur tourism. Luckily I had purchased s booklet about Port Arthur that contained information about the hours and images that I could use for my scan.
I took a wide angle view from the entryway that looked up the stairway and the viewer can see all the way to the back of the house looking through a lovely wooden archway. The photo was ideal for the background of my poster. It was a welcoming shot with carpeted floor, lovely wall paper, a vista to the back of the house and best of all from the standpoint of adding large text to the head of the poster it had a large blank ceiling.
The choice of photos was fairly easy because they were images I liked. A concern is that some of the images have hotspots or have overexposed areas that could not be fixed completely. The problem is mainly due to low light in the rooms as a conservation issue however some rooms had strong window light coming in causing the window to blowout. I was aware of this at the time of shooting but access to the rooms was limited to doorways and I had to shoot with the equipment and conditions available as we were departing the next morning with no opportunity to reshoot. That said, I exposed for the items in the room trying for the best shots possible. Not only was external light a problem so was interior lighting. Some rooms had very low lighting with the exception of desk lamps. I'm satisfied I got the images of items I wanted but the lamps have hot spots.
The design was fairly straight forward with the central arch and the leading line to the back of the house. There was ample room on either side of the arch to install a row of photos on either side go give the viewers a glimpse of what was in store for their visit.
The ceiling over the archway had plenty of space for a two line heading, a small photo of one of the Commandants. Initially I thought I should use some element to hide the ceiling and add something that said Port Arthur. I tried a few things including extracting a piece of wall from another photo to use as a faded background for the text. In the end I didn't like it and felt it didn't suit the mood of the poster so it was removed. The font for the heading is one that is easy to read but still has elegance to it befitting the topic. The colour used for the heading text was sampled from the wall paper in the entry way to keep everything tied together and it also woks well with the blue of the stairs. There was a bit of awkward space one either side of the Commandant's photo in the heading and to fix that I added two graphic elements that complement the heading font.
Text was added to the fore ground of the poster as something to entice viewers to visit the house. I used white text over the dark carpet to lead the viewers eye into the photo to the white at the top of the stairs as well to the images around on the borders.
The project is not with out its problems. Mostly my fault for not fulling woking out my workflow and silly saving which resulted in my layered image being flattened. While frustrating it was a good opportunity to rebuild the poster and tweak it as I went along and made sure to save lots stepped versions.
Throughout the project I tried to make optimal use of guidelines and the snap to grid feature and tried to learn and use actions.
After completing the poster and saving the various version I realised there was a glaring spelling mistake even though several people had glanced at it. Oh well, it is all part of the learning process and a reminder to use the "check spelling" feature in Photoshop or create text in another application with as you type red underlining of misspellings.
