For me, Photoshop is one of the strongest forms of digital punishment known to man; I admire those who adeptly wield its myriad tools, because when I open up Photoshop, I typically find that it makes me feel at least thirty percent less intelligent than I really am.  But I feel that way about pretty much anything that’s complicated — which may be why I’m still single — so take that with a grain of salt.

Anyway, despite my pride-based aversion to Photoshop, sometimes I do find reasons to dip my feet into its treacherous waters; those reasons are usually centered around my website or a photo book, but occasionally some other project pushes me in that direction.  One such project came up just the other day.

During a trip that will be covered in another post, I visited Lehigh University last week.  Lehigh’s current mascot is the Mountain Hawk, a useful but fairly unremarkable mascot; however, the Mountain Hawk was not always the common nickname for Lehigh’s athletic teams.  They don’t publicize the prior nickname much (or, from my outside perspective, at all) anymore, and that’s sad, because that nickname and its accompanying logo were remarkably unique and appealing: before they were the Mountain Hawks, they were the Engineers.

Since the Engineer logo is almost nonexistent on campus (aside from two old banners in the athletic hall of fame) and is completely nonexistent in the range of available Lehigh merchandise, I decided I wanted to try to capture the logo so I could have my own copy of that wonderful piece of Lehigh’s history.  This proved to be a challenge, as the two banners in the hall of fame are under glass; with the limited opportunity and light I had, I got these pictures:

After I spent some time stumbling around in Photoshop, I ended up with a finished product I actually liked:

So, despite Lehigh’s decision to cast aside the grizzled, determined Engineer (and his grizzled, determined stubble) and become the Mountain Hawks, the Engineer will persist … on this blog, anyway.

(And, as it turns out, on a shirt or two.)