Time and Space
John Anthony Muth
I
love history, all kinds of history, so the Klett and Wolfe project was very
inspirational for me. I wanted to find
old photos of Arizona specifically around the Phoenix metro area and show how
the city has developed over time and that it was close and easy to find,
hopefully. First I searched for Arizona
historical photos on Google and found the ASU library but costs were involved
and they had copyright watermarks everywhere. So I turned to the Library
of Congress who had plenty of photographs with a variety of downloading
options. I thought this assignment might be fairly simple but as I discovered
finding the exact spot where the previous photographer was not so simple and I
don't know what type of camera or lens was used. I plunged into it
anyway and tried to find similar perspectives and brought printed copies of the
photos as well. Needless to say that I don't have the same lens so I took
panoramic images of each site and hoped for the best. I will digitally
transform them to fit as best I can but I'm not sure how to present the changes
in scenery at this time…
As
it turned out I changed almost every photograph into a different type of
layout. Some photos were close to spot
on but others were the wrong angle of perspective so no matter what I did some
images were not going to fit. First
thing I did was to create panoramic of each scene in the “File > Automate
> Photomerge” menu option in Photoshop.
Once an automated panoramic came out then I placed my photo and took
either a part of the image like a mountain or maybe a corner of a building and
then reduced opacity to about half to see how everything lines up. I did have to change the panoramic of a
couple of photos because they were just not fitting. I usually had to resize and manipulate one or
both images to make them closely fit (except one photo which was totally off).
Once I had a fit I tried to show both images either by reducing the opacity
and/or masking certain areas to show changes in the landscape or
cityscape. I am relatively happy with
the results but have a much better idea of how to tackle problems of originally
shooting the correct angles and giving myself more time into merging the two
images seamlessly.
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