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Bay and College looking South

Posted by Damon Schreiber (Toronto, Canada) on 4 August 2007 in Cityscape & Urban and Portfolio.

Sakamoto/Schreiber - Toronto 1977-2007 series starts here.

Something like a method:

What follows is what I have learned in trying to reproduce photos taken by someone else 30 years ago. I'm hoping that it might illuminate the process and perhaps save someone else some of the trouble I went through in capturing these images.

First, I think it's important to define what we're trying to do here. As I said earlier, I went from the original idea of showing how a given scene looks today, to refining it into a perfectionist ideal. I think that's useful, because it gives you something to aspire to, even though it's not always possible to achieve. In this case my ultimate goal with regards to angle and perspective was to be able to overlay my image with one of Sakamoto-san's in Photoshop so that all the common elements were aligned. This proved an elusive goal, but not always completely impossible. Still, I'm a realistic perfectionist, so in many cases, I had to admit that allowances must be made for unavoidable circumstances. As an exercise to the reader, try taking a photo of scenery more or less at random close to your home, but not too close. Wait a month, and then try duplicating the image exactly.

A secondary goal was to capture common elements that might not be stationary. For example in today's photo I wanted to wait until a city bus was in more or less the same position as in the 1977 shot. Thus one sees other ways besides architecture in which the city changes or stays the same. (In this case, Bay street still has a bus route, but the buses are no longer electric trollies. This one is a "Bio Bus" which I believe burns bio-diesel fuel.) Similar human content was something I strove for, but in general, I went with the assumption that the more people the better. As these are documentary shots, it will likely be rewarding to have a record of how people look in 2007, so why not include them.

So, with these goals in mind, I'll tell you how I tried to achieve them, and I'll expand on some more completely in the days ahead. First thing would be to find the actual locations. Being a frequent traveller in downtown Toronto, this has been the least of my worries. Still, a couple places were difficult to identify, and one photo of a residential house is still a mystery to me. I printed all the photos I wanted to retake, 2 to a sheet, kept them in my camera bag, and went out to shoot.

Here's the recipe for success:
1) Use the same focal length. Sakamoto-san used a 28mm lens on a 35mm camera. I didn't know that until I tried to duplicate the viewpoints. It seemed right, and he confirmed it.

2) Point the camera in the same direction the original photographer did. Sounds obvious, but there's a trick or two to it.

3) Position the camera in the same exact space that the original photographer did. In three dimensional space. So that's left-right, front-back, and up-down. Finding this spot is probably the hardest part in achieving the first part of my goal.

4) For the second part of my goal, click the shutter at the right moment. In Friday's example, it meant waiting until the streetcar was exactly in the right position.

And as I'm feeling verbose (poor you) I'll speak more about those four points in the following days.

Note: This was another deceptively difficult one to get. Sometimes clues can be misleading, like when a bus shelter is now closer to the camera than it was in 1977, or when a streetlight is higher. Some things that look kind of permanent have been subtly altered.

Top image copyright Shige Sakamoto - 坂本政恵

High-res here (my image) and here (1977 image). The entire 1977 series can be viewed in context starting here.

[Bay & College, Toronto]
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