Original concept for Mormon2Catholic

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I was setting up the picture of my new wedding ring when I found this picture in my Flickr account. It's a picture that I took with my new camera I got for Christmas. I really like the way it came out, with the focus, and the Photoshop fixes I put in it. It's a very moving photograph with a lot of meaning.

When I decided to make the switch from Agnostic2Catholic to Mormon2Catholic, I really wanted a picture of a rosary in the graphic. To me, the rosary is a very clearly Catholic icon. I couldn't find any pictures of a rosary that I liked, so I decided to take a picture of my own rosary. Then I had the idea of somehow juxtaposing a rosary and a Book of Mormon together to get a picture that showed both aspects of this blog. I had found a picture of a rosary on an open bible that I found was very moving, so I decided to make my own version of this picture, but with a Book of Mormon instead of a bible.

After taking a bunch of photographs, I narrowed it down to this one. Then I made a few tweaks in the picture in Photoshop, like the lighting effect. Once I had the picture exactly how I liked it, the only problem was that I couldn't figure out how to make the picture look good as a background. The whole picture really needed to be visible to make the impact that I wanted to make, so using a cropped version of the picture as a background for the header wasn't going to work either.

I finally came up with the "Book of Mormon" inspired artwork for the title, and I used Photoshop to create the text. Adding a texture on the back really gave it a Faux Blue Leather feel, like those freebie Book of Mormons that the missionaries hand out. By the way, the blue leather looks fantastic in Firefox, because it's the entire page background and not only the logo background.

I'm very happy with the final layout of this blog, but I just wanted to share this picture with you because I was really proud of it. I'm not much of a photographer, but I really love this picture.