I was hired by an architectural firm to photograph four mural panels at a local college. The architects had been engaged to do some redesign work at the school. Part of the redesign included covering up the murals. The murals are mixed media pieces and include some relief elements on two of the panels.
The Problem: The contractors doing the work of covering the murals and the new construction began taking the relief pieces off before I got there to photograph the murals. The pieces that had been removed had not yet been thrown away and were still in the area when I got there. The relief elements on one of the mural panels included 31 separate painted tiles. Some of the tiles were still fully intact. Some were complete but in pieces. For some, there were only one or two pieces of the tiles available.
The Solution: I photographed all of the tiles and pieces I could find. Fortunately, the architects had taken some photos of the murals for their own use so I was able to use those to help in reconstructing the mural tiles. For those where the tiles were fully intact, I was able to simply scale the images and put them in the proper place on the mural. For those where I had a full tile but in pieces, I reassembled the pieces in Photoshop and cleaned up any join lines. In the case of the tiles where I only had pieces, I had to put the pieces I had into the mural then reconstruct the colour and detail from scratch.
The image below is the finished, reassembled mural panel. The gallery below that is the tiles and pieces I started with. The mural was shot in 7 segments and stitched together in order to provide a large, high quality image file to the client.
If you’re in need of a commercial photographer for a project, I’d be happy to talk about it with you. You can contact me via email at photog(at)rf-photography(dot)ca or on 289-240-0949
