... and Using Local Letters!

This is a bit of a different post from us today. We thought we’d try and play around with some photography and see how we could use it in a project. Recently we saw these Typography safaris on offer in London and although we haven’t been able to book onto it for time (and life!) reasons, we wondered if we could do something similar and use some of the letters in our local area.  Of course we are NOT trying to imply that this is a substitute!

Although there are lots of fonts out there that you can buy or download for free, a lot of fun can be had by creating your own letter images from photos – just like cutting out letters from a magazine - which can then be used for adding to images. Like a digital collage!

We decided to keep VERY local and focused our efforts on Oxford Road in Reading. This is a very busy road, with lots of diversity and shops, salons, and food places galore. It is also a very historic road, with lots of letters to be found in old street signs, engravings and on some of the older buildings. So a wide contrast and lots to choose from!

Here are some of the original photos (we took LOTS but wont bore you with them all)

Simply by enhancing the pictures in your photo software, and cropping them to single letters, you can have a whole array of alphabet letters to use however you want. You need to save each one as a separate image but the beauty of this is that they don't need to be a standard size - it looks more like cut-outs if they're different shaped squares and rectangles. We used Microsoft Publisher to create this Alphabet poster (but any publishing / picture software would do):

Here's an example of how you could use them:

We found this amazing old photo of Oxford Road (courtesy of Wikipedia) from 1893. How cool is this?!

Here's how it looks now(ish) (from Google images)

And using the letters, we have put the photos together to create a poster:

There are so many possibilities with locations (even around your house?!) and themes. Why not give it a try? Its soooo much fun and totally worth the strange looks you get when crouching down on the pavement to photo a drain cover!!

We are linking up to these parties!

October 2013: Update - this post was featured here at Dream a Little Bigger

October 2013: Update - this post was featured here at A Life in Balance