Suitable Images 

Which images would present a good snapshot of Sackville’s history?

This question couldn’t be answered until I did an extensive amount of research to know more about pertinent events, major milestones, and the important work done by previous settlers in the history of Sackville.  

I went through numerous books. Among them, two ‘Sackville Then and Now’ by Kip Jackson and Charlie Scobie and ‘People of Tantramar’ by Charlie Scobie were extremely useful.

Image Sources:

Next, I searched through hundreds of images contained in the archives of Tantramar Heritage Trust and Mount Allison University. For any given area, if possible, I chose more than one image not knowing which one will turn out well.

Fortunately, Tantramar Heritage Trust had a summer student, Alex Nay, who was able to scan old photographs and postcards in high resolution.

Renée Beliveau, the archivist at Mount Allison university, was extremely kind in scanning various photographs in high resolution.  

Apart from these two major sources, several images came from private collection of postcards or photographs of various individuals.

Image Quality:

Though images were scanned in high resolution, many were not of good quality to begin with. Many were too dark or didn’t have enough contrast. Look at this postcard of Morice’s Mill Pond . The details are hard to see. The image doesn’t have many areas of high contrast.

Fixing Images:

‍Many images like the one shown above required hours of work to be done in Photoshop. On some, I drew by hand to bring out the details.

When transferring image on a ceramic tile, many of the intricate details become obscure.  

Since my goal was to depict the past, I felt that the fuzziness gave the impression of vintage, an image from the past,foggy, and indistinct because time has obscured some of the details.   

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