Sebastian is a wizard.
He can turn back the hands of time when he restores photographs.
Natalie Merchant
" Leave Your Sleep"
In 2009, Sebastian Wintermute was commissioned to restore photographs of poets whose works were adopted by Natalie Merchant for her double album Leave Your Sleep. Among the poets were British Victorians such as Edward Lear, Christina Rossetti, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, as well as 20th-century American writers E.E. Cummings and Ogden Nash.
The photographs came from many libraries, museums, and private collections in both the US and the UK. Each photograph had to be carefully retouched to remove the appearance of the damages sustained over the years and give all of the restored images a consistent look and feel to be organically incorporated into the design of a handsome 80-page hardcover book created by award-winning British book designer David Pearson, with the addition of biographical essays on the poets by Natalie Merchant.
With photo editing and retouching by Sebastian Wintermute, the photographs became cleaner and clearer, showing greater details and richer tones while still retaining the vintage look that fit the historical context and narration. The task of restoring many of those photographs presented an additional challenge with the requirement that the final restored and retouched images should be enlarged to a size and resolution high enough to be displayed on a projection screen during Natalie Merchant’s concerts.
By using photo editing techniques and filters specifically designed for the task of enlarging elements of small photographs without degrading image quality or compromising the authenticity of the original photos, Sebastian Wintermute was able to create images of the desired size and quality to be used in a video presentation, even when additional video effects such as zoom, rotation, cross-fade, mix, and dissolve were applied to the photographs to produce the video presentation that accompanied the live performances.