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Bay and Queen Looking North

Posted by Damon Schreiber (Toronto, Canada) on 6 August 2007 in Cityscape & Urban and Portfolio.

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

On the importance of where you point that camera

The second part of reverse-engineering a photo like this is try to point the camera at the same thing the original photographer did. Let me explain why I'm even mentioning this point which likely seems self-evident:

I've mentioned a few times before that this isn't as easy as it looks, and because it can look easy, many times I've confidently strode out into the world with my camera, snapped a few shots at a given site, and come home, loaded up Photoshop, and have been crushed that I completely missed the angles.

So it struck me that it would probably help if I new exactly what to point at. The thing is that when you look at a photo, even printed on paper, the centre point isn't always the most obvious thing. The brightest or most interesting subject might grab your attention rather than the actual centre point. In Photoshop, I set up horizontal and vertical guides in the exact centre of the images, then from the intersection I could determine the exact centre of the photo. Then I circled the spot with a red pen on my printouts. This allowed me to point at the same thing when I went out to photograph these scenes. In this photo, for example, the centre is just in front of the first boy's face, just below the side window on the bus.

This really helped my success rate, so I highly recommend it. It's not always easy to visualise the three dimensional world as a photo - at least for me, so this trick really was an improvement. There is one problem with this approach which makes it less than foolproof: The copies of the photos I have from Sakamoto-san are all cropped to fit the 1024x768 screen size. Therefore, unless he cropped the exact middle of the photo, my centrepoint is off. Still, it does help.

Note: This photo shows (New) City Hall on the left, and Old City Hall on the right. It took me a while to figure it out, but this photo was one of the ones taken from inside a vehicle: a bus or a streetcar. Thus it was impossible to completely reproduce the angles from my vantage on the sidewalk.

I could have taken the Queen Streetcar eastbound, but after a quick calculation of the odds of being able to get the same angles and a bus stopped right there at the intersection as the streetcar passed versus the expense in time it would take to get it right, I abandoned that thought. So while some of these angles work out, others are completely off. Notice the position of the walk light relative to Old City Hall behind it.

Also notice that the walk light and the street sign have swapped positions over the course of 30 years. Ah, the games people play...

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 & Queen, Toronto]
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