Looking Into My Future

"Family faces are magic mirrors. Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present, and future."
~Gail Lumet Buckley



The reason I used this photo with the quote is because the little redhead looking into the mirror is me as a child, and the child looking back from within the mirror is my oldest child (back when she was about that age).

I created this photo manipulation years ago, and I thought other moms might like to try and make one of their own, so I decided to share it. It doesn't take a huge amount of photo editing skill. (I know it doesn't
because I am not particularly skilled.)

It does, however, mean you have to have a photo of yourself as a child looking into a mirror so that your face is showing. Not everyone will have a photo like this, but for those that do, they can make one of these generation pictures too! It also helps if you have a dress that your child can wear that is at least similar to the one you wore in the photo as a child and you'll need a mirror to take the photo of your child looking into.

I was fortunate in that my mom had saved the dress I wore in the photo as a child, and my sister took photos of my daughter in a similar pose at a similar age in the same dress.

The only cropping I had to do was of my daughter's face in the mirror in her photo. I then pasted it into the mirror in my photo and smoothed the edges to make it blend. I had previously tried this with a regular, non-mirrored image of my daughter and it didn't look right; it made the image in the frame look more like a photograph the child-me was looking at than a mirror. It had to be a reflected image of her that I used to paste into the mirror.

I then bordered the image and added the text.

I did use a little bit more skill in this than is needed to do this successfully. I actually cropped my daughter's image out, and before I pasted it, I added a photograph I had taken of a sunset sky to the background within the mirror. This isn't necessary for this picture, but it was an added touch I wanted to make. And there was also a lot of touching up that had to be done to the original scan of the photo of me as a child because it was a scan of a photograph that was old and had some of the fading and discoloration that can happen with age in photos.

The photography part of this might take a bit of effort and ingenuity, but once you've got the right photos, the rest is easy.