Welcome to the Christian Fiction Scavenger Hunt!

If you’ve just discovered the hunt, be sure to start at Stop #1, and collect the clues through all the stops, in order, so you can enter to win one of our top 5 grand prizes!

  • The hunt BEGINS on 10/15 at noon MST with Stop #1 at LisaTawnBergren.com.
  • Hunt through our loop using Chrome or Firefox as your browser (not Explorer).
  • There is NO RUSH to complete the hunt—you have all weekend (until Sunday, 10/18 at midnight MST)! So take your time, reading the unique posts along the way; our hope is that you discover new authors/new books and learn new things about them.
  • Submit your entry for the grand prizes by collecting the CLUE on each author’s scavenger hunt post and submitting your answer in the Rafflecopter form at the final stop, back on Lisa’s site. Many authors are offering additional prizes along the way!

I’m so glad you’re joining us! I’m Roseanna M. White, writer of historical romance that always seems to include spies or war or mayhem of some sort…which is ironic, because my life is ridiculously ordinary. (Well, if you discount the fact that I have all these stories in my head. Which, if one can trust my 12-year-old son, you should definitely discount.) Most of my books are set in Edwardian/World War 1 England, but I also have a few American-set stories and some biblical fiction too. I hope you take a minute to look around and even check out my book-themed T-shirts, tote bags, and tea parties!

But today let’s focus on my latest release, A Portrait of Loyalty.

Set in 1918, this final book in the Codebreakers series (it can be read alone, don’t worry!) has a heroine who’s a photographer working for Intelligence and a crytographer hero who just escaped to England from Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution…though of course, his enemies aren’t about to let one of their Intelligence’s highest ranking officers leave without a fuss. We’ve got war, betrayal, questions about propaganda, the purpose of art, the Spanish flu, the biggest aerial raid of the war, and of course a love story all packed in these pages! (Click on the book cover to see the actual description here on my website.)

As I did my research for this series, I knew I wanted to write a book about the photographers that did so much work for the Admiralty during the war, especially when I learned that a fake photograph played a huge part in the end of the war. But how, I wondered, did these photographers even do what they did?

How You Photoshopped a Picture Before Photoshop

I’m a book cover designer and graphic artist in my (ahem) spare time, so I do a lot of photo-manipulation…but I do it all digitally. I’ve always wondered how people did the same work before the advent of computers, and when they even started doing it.

The answer: they’ve been doing it since the dawn of photography! Some of the earliest examples we have of photographs include touch-ups, cut-outs, or inserts. And some of the most famous ones too. (Like quite a few of Abraham Lincoln.) But how?

For small changes–blotting out a figure they didn’t want in there, smoothing out flaws, that sort of thing–the retoucher would go in with a paintbrush and simply match the shades of the surrounding items (keeping in mind these were in black and white) to make items disappear or change. But this took skill, especially if you were trying to work on a person–to remove scars or freckles or otherwise “airbrush” a figure. Too heavy a hand, and the people would start to look fake. (Leading to an outcry in the photography community against any retouching at all.)

Complete self-instructing library of practical photography via Archive.org // Public Domain

But then there were the more extreme examples, when an artist was called upon to combine images to create a new one. When I’m doing this work in Photoshop, I always select what I want from one image, cut it out, paste it on a new layer. Well, go figure, that’s exactly what they did then too! They would literally cut one image out of a print and paste it onto another photograph, then reshoot it and develop it as a single image.

Of course, a skilled eye could detect this work–it left small edges, or evidence of where the two layers met. Sometimes there would be a shadow between the old and new or you could see where the paper had bubbled from the glue. But the best artists left little evidence of their work…and of course, my heroine is the best of the best. 😉

A retouching desk. Image credit: Finishing the Negative via Google Books. // Public Domain

Here’s the Stop #8 Basics:
If you’re interested, you can order A Portrait of Loyalty on Amazon,
Barnes & Noble, ChristianBook or get a signed copy from my store here!

Clue to Write Down:
you

Link to Stop #9, the Next Stop on the Loop:
Robin Lee Hatcher’s site!

Giveaway!

I’m giving away a signed copy of my book PLUS your choice of a Bookish Tote bag from my store to one US winner ~ or a copy of my book sent from Book Depository to an international winner!