I spent the bulk of my “formative years” on other continents.  Shortly after I was born, my family moved to Kampala, Uganda, and about two years after that we moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina.  We moved back to the United States when I was about six.

You’d think, with all that traveling and a new child, that my parents would have taken a TON of pictures, right?  Apparently not.

When I saw yesterday’s assignment for the Daily Create, to recreate a childhood photo, I wanted to give it a go.  There are very few photos of my childhood, and certainly none of them here with me at school.  Fortunately, a while back, my sister scanned one from when we were on a safari in Uganda and put it on facebook, so it was really my only option for a childhood photo to ‘recreate.’

I’m on the right in the adorable overalls.

That being said, can you take a moment and try to imagine how difficult it would be to recreate this picture?  There aren’t many cattle skulls or open plains in Fredericksburg.  So here’s what I ended up with:

While I knew it would be difficult, I thought I could at least pull something off.  I was also wrong about that.  I forgot that growing taller also means growing wider, so I couldn’t fit myself very easily over my four-year old body in the photo.  I did get to play with photoshop tools though in this one because once I erased the background from the layer for the second picture, I was left with some flowing hair over my shoulder that looked extremely out of place.  Erasing that wouldn’t help though because then I’d be left with a blank spot in the picture.  Granted it is a splotchy job at best, I used the clone and stamp tools to recreate something of a sky and the remainder of that hill over my shoulder.

In all, this didn’t take me very long to do, but it did present a challenge and I had fun doing it.  TDC428 completed.