This is a picture of me and my sister in Venice and the text is from a piece of travel writing I wrote about the trip. The first thing I wanted to do was make the picture a bit more hazy and out of focus so it looked less like a photograph. By using the diffuse glow option in the filter section, the scene blends together more and definitely brings the reader's attention to the text leaving the photograph to serve as the background as opposed to the photograph and text competing for the reader's attention in the foreground.
Then I took three statements from my writing that I felt related to what this scene depicts, a typical Venetian alley with a gondola parked in the background. I played with the fonts, colors and style to see which combinations would provide the best way to present the text so the reader could easily read the writing and take in the scene at the same time. I put the dark text on the white backgrounds and used the outer glow effect to make the lighter text stand out better, however doing so did obscure the building in the background.
These are the three statements I felt could be related to this scene:
Around noon, with the sun baking the narrow cobblestone streets, a gondola trip is tempting, if not really the best way to escape the heat.
A trip up and down the canals is anything but cheap, 100 Euros for what equates to a 20 minute ride through the streets of Venice. The ferry ride to the city is about a quarter of that price.
The typical Venetian alleyway is lined with strange stucco buildings, more like the houses you would expect to see in suburban Florida, but painted in all the different shades of salmon and marigold.
There are many additional features that would enhance this project. One idea I thought of would be if there was a way to make the text boxes pop up when you pass the mouse over a different section of the photo, the text would still be included but would not distract a reader from the picture. It was also frustrating to be unable to shape the text boxes in the forms I wanted to. I could not discover a way to shape the text box in a three-sided shape which would have been beneficial in placing the text.
Last modified 11 February 2008