The one thing that bothers me more than it should, it's than the new photos are not taken at the same angle and/or distance than the original ones, making the comparison worse than it could.
You should keep in mind that getting the lens focal length right is very important here, and it's something that's rather hard to do if you don't know what the original focal length and film size was.
It shouldn't be that hard if you have the original photo with you when taking the new picture. Simply look at the proportion of near and far objects and walk back and forth until they are the same as in the old picture.
I recall a talk or possibly HN post I saw once, where they developed some software to warp photos like this to account for camera position and focal length.
I completely agree. I find the sliders to be frustrating and detract from the experience of taking in the changes in their entirety. We aren't doing a pixel by pixel comparison so the UI shouldn't treat it that way.
I'm a sucker for these kinds of photo comparison essays .. always great to see, and as a recent implant to Europe its been a decade now of looking at people's old pictures, before/during WW2, and comparing to how it is now in the modern age .. and I'm always struck by how modern things seemed to have looked in 1930's/40's ..
The first two pictures in this article for example include buildings which to my modern eye look out of place "in the early part of the last century", as they are 'too modern'.
But then I wander around these places now and see these buildings in their physical form, and I'm filled with even more wonder that they survived so long and still have a feeling of modernity to them. I wonder where this bubble came from and how it came to be that I cannot see the modern world for the centuries-long process it is, and only feel connected with 'modernity' formed in the recent decade or so. I think this is something that changes as one gets older and starts to care about these things - never in my youth would I have been concerned with the trivial meanderings of comparison with the then and now.
Capital-intensive things which age well, like buildings, are very stale in a way that is shocking when you are used to thinking about nearly anything else, but especially electronics. It was a startling realization for me as well.
I think the era we are born into define us way more than we'd like to admit and it includes our feeling of being at home in the architectural environment we grew up into.
There is something along that line in Rice's vampire chronicles where she states vampires tend to prefer and retain the taste for what was considered beautiful or worthwhile when they were humane.
The picture of the City Palace (Stadtschloss) is interesting. It looks like they accidentally swapped the old and the new picture. The building is complete in 1939 and far from finished in 2015. Upon further research (Ok, I wiki'd it) I found out the original building had been knocked down to make way for parking in 2008 and only 5 years later in 2013 they decided to start rebuilding it.
The site has an interesting history. The former Stadtschloss suffered serious destruction during WWII ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Palace,_Berlin ) and the Communist East tore it completely down to build the Palace of the Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_the_Republic,_Berlin and acted as the hub of DDR government. Once the wall fell, and DDR disintegrated, in 2008 DDR's Palace of Republic was almost completed demolished, and work on new Stadtschloss which very much resembles the original commenced.
Well, there is a bit missing in this story. The City Palace was actually demolished during the GDR time and replaced by the "Palast der Republik" (the palace of the republic). This Palace of the Republic (which did not really look like a palace very much) was then torn down in 2008 to make place for a reconstruction of the pre-GDR building.
I think it is a bit sad that Germany does not leave more GDR-era buildings standing. They might not always be the most visually appealing buildings (just like the GDR was not a very appealing state in many regards), but they still represent an important part of Germanys history.
Not an expert photographer, but while there are plenty of more "authentic" ways of reproducing the older photos, there are also lots of post-processing tools for digital (Photoshop plugins and the like) that do a great job of simulating all sorts of film stocks.
They're a step above your typical Instagram-type filters and you can tweak effect parameters and strength depending what you're going for. It can easily devolve into gimmickry and I'm sure a skilled photographer and editor can do more without presets/plugins but for the average or hobbyist photographer I've found them to be a good starting point.
I'm not the greatest photographer, but my impression is that they mostly have very high contrast; the photographer let a lot of dark areas fall into shadow. To some degree you can accomplish this in editing, but one shortcut to interesting photos is to shoot when the sun is low in the sky which naturally creates strong contrast.
Films behave a little differently than digital sensors. Films don't have perfect reciprocity characteristics (1/2 the exposure doesn't necessarily yield 1/2 the negative density, but digital sensors essentially count photons and obey the reciprocity law quite well), nor does slide film have the dynamic range of digital sensors, so the look tends to be different. I was recently taking some pictures around town with Velvia 50 and immediately thought "wow, this looks like it was taken in 1990". It really does give a distinct look. The sky gives it away: https://goo.gl/photos/ciawuX28bbBhnehc7
There are also other characteristics that come into play. With digital sensors, you're capturing colors as seen by the color matrix on top of the sensor; Nikon, Canon, and Sony make these differently. With film, you're physically activating dye, and the dyes are also chosen uniquely for each film. So the colors can end up looking different, both because of process difference and intentional changes of the color. (Velvia 50 does not provide what one would call accurate color, but the inaccuracy is quite pleasing. The same goes for the Kodachrome/Ektachrome which were very popular in their times.)
IMO the most important characteristic that digital lacks is the "shoulder" of negative films. Once you exceed the target exposure of the film by several stops, it starts to take exponentially more light to further expose those areas. This translates into the ability to capture more detail in the highlights. It's not ideal - the tones of the film are certainly "blocked up", and color film may start to show color shifts (usually to yellow). It's better to hit the exposure properly. But with proper scanning or wet-printing technique (particularly split-filter printing) you can recover quite a lot of detail.
On digital - when the pixel goes to 255 light intensity, it's just gone. There's no way to recover data that isn't there. The Magic Lantern firmware has the ability to scan out lines alternating between high and low ISOs to capture blown-out areas, but it's not perfect either.
"Modern" films tend to be very well-behaved with regards to these kind of characteristics, actually. Acros 100 has virtually no reciprocity failure - for exposures between 2 minutes and 10 minutes you need to add 1/2 stop of light. I've recovered pictures off negatives with virtually no visible exposure. The tonality is great and the grain is virtually invisible even with Rodinal. The new Portra 400 is also extremely forgiving - you can get something workable up to about ISO 1600 or 3200 with standard processing, and if you push process (develop longer) it's even better.
For color I mostly use Velvia 50 and Ektar 100 both which have poor reciprocity characteristics. When the meter indicates 10 seconds I expose for 20, and the results are pretty good: https://goo.gl/photos/uL3a8Ezf3NJfhdP49 Note that it's turning white lights green because of the reciprocity effects, but I kind of like that color. (The datasheet recommends a filter to correct this, making the exposure even longer. Given that I took this picture on a bridge, 40 seconds without a car going over and ruining the photo was going to be a stretch. Indeed, this picture is a little blurred because the bridge moved; my digital camera took a much better picture under these conditions.)
I have some Provia 100F which works to something like 160 seconds, I will try that in the future for long exposures.
I haven't tried the Portra films yet, as I mostly do landscapes, not portraits, and prefer Fuji's inaccurate colors for that application. (Ektar is a bit more muted color-wise, which yields a nice calming effect: https://goo.gl/photos/jMLY9UwS5Uwn2TQW7 )
One other thing: digital camera tend to get rated on shadow detail, not highlight detail, so their built-in light meters tend to "expose to the right", discarding highlights in favor of collecting more shadow detail. If you meter off an 18% grey card, a real light meter tends to give a shorter exposure than the camera's built-in meter, better preserving highlights. As someone who likes a well-defined sky, I'm betrayed by the camera manufacturers here. (But you'll of course notice it on the screen, and you can just turn the exposure compensation wheel to underexpose, and you're golden. It is not quite so easy with slide film, involving a lot of measurements and very careful spot metering. Therein lies the fun.)
Very droll. That photo was taken in West Berlin and the car in question is a BMW 600[1], built between 1957 and 1959. (Oddly enough, I saw its little sister[2] not far from that spot a few days ago.)
Interesting how much of the prominent architecture is still in ruins (presumably from WWII era bombing) into the 50's and 60's.
I mean, I guess it makes sense, since there was a lot of stuff to repair and important infrastructure and industry was probably higher on the to-do list than Cathedral and Courthouse repair. But I hadn't really thought about how long the prominent war-time damage would've lasted.
If you are referring to the third picture ("Gedächtniskirche"), this is intentional. The church is kept in this partially restored state as a monument against war.
As noted, the church in question was left that way to serve as a memorial. The "courthouse" you mention was destroyed in World War 2, however the "rebuilding" is something that just started in the last few years. During the time that Germany was divided, East Germany had their parliament building there:
I think Berlin is unusual. Construction happens very slowly here. Things don't get fixed quickly. And there is a lack of desire to change the city too much, physically.
As an example, the paving on the pathways is in a constant state of being repaired because the design is such that the little stone blocks pop out very easily. Many of the side roads are still cobbled (and a nightmare to cycle on). People don't worry about it.
As an American, I think those cobbled streets are one of the most charming things about Berlin. IIRC, many of the sidewalks are of some stone-like construction as well, quite a delightful change from the flat, poured concrete that I have to walk on in the US. When there are sidewalks at all that is.
It's almost as if it was all designed to lure one outside.
One of my favourite advances between the 1963 / 2015 photos of Gedächtniskirche isn't the glass skyscrapers or even the restoration of the church, but just how many trees there are now lining the streets. Definitely more enticing to be outside.
I grew up in Berlin in the 70s and early 80s, and I remember some bombed-out ruins that were slowly crumbling. A bit of a post-apocalyptic sight. The ones I remember were close to the wall between east and west Berlin - real estate that used to be city center but now was very much at the margins. Maybe that was a factor in not redeveloping some properties for a long time.
Indeed, my mother visited Berlin during the 60s or 70s and was surprised by how many buildings lay in ruin or bore obvious marks of the war. Warsaw was immaculate by comparison. (For those who don't know, Warsaw was intentionally flattened by the Germans in almost its entirety.) Most of the rubble had been cleared away and much of the city had been rebuilt, albeit according to new socialist principles and styles. Only a fraction of the pre-war architecture was rebuilt (most famously the Old Town). I'm sure a difference in politics in both cities played a role—the communist regime in Poland had been the most "liberal" of the Eastern Bloc—but I don't know for certain what the exact causes were.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 27.3 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7717242
The first two pictures in this article for example include buildings which to my modern eye look out of place "in the early part of the last century", as they are 'too modern'.
But then I wander around these places now and see these buildings in their physical form, and I'm filled with even more wonder that they survived so long and still have a feeling of modernity to them. I wonder where this bubble came from and how it came to be that I cannot see the modern world for the centuries-long process it is, and only feel connected with 'modernity' formed in the recent decade or so. I think this is something that changes as one gets older and starts to care about these things - never in my youth would I have been concerned with the trivial meanderings of comparison with the then and now.
There is something along that line in Rice's vampire chronicles where she states vampires tend to prefer and retain the taste for what was considered beautiful or worthwhile when they were humane.
I think it is a bit sad that Germany does not leave more GDR-era buildings standing. They might not always be the most visually appealing buildings (just like the GDR was not a very appealing state in many regards), but they still represent an important part of Germanys history.
I've messed with these a bit: https://www.google.com/nikcollection/
They're a step above your typical Instagram-type filters and you can tweak effect parameters and strength depending what you're going for. It can easily devolve into gimmickry and I'm sure a skilled photographer and editor can do more without presets/plugins but for the average or hobbyist photographer I've found them to be a good starting point.
There are also other characteristics that come into play. With digital sensors, you're capturing colors as seen by the color matrix on top of the sensor; Nikon, Canon, and Sony make these differently. With film, you're physically activating dye, and the dyes are also chosen uniquely for each film. So the colors can end up looking different, both because of process difference and intentional changes of the color. (Velvia 50 does not provide what one would call accurate color, but the inaccuracy is quite pleasing. The same goes for the Kodachrome/Ektachrome which were very popular in their times.)
On digital - when the pixel goes to 255 light intensity, it's just gone. There's no way to recover data that isn't there. The Magic Lantern firmware has the ability to scan out lines alternating between high and low ISOs to capture blown-out areas, but it's not perfect either.
"Modern" films tend to be very well-behaved with regards to these kind of characteristics, actually. Acros 100 has virtually no reciprocity failure - for exposures between 2 minutes and 10 minutes you need to add 1/2 stop of light. I've recovered pictures off negatives with virtually no visible exposure. The tonality is great and the grain is virtually invisible even with Rodinal. The new Portra 400 is also extremely forgiving - you can get something workable up to about ISO 1600 or 3200 with standard processing, and if you push process (develop longer) it's even better.
I have some Provia 100F which works to something like 160 seconds, I will try that in the future for long exposures.
I haven't tried the Portra films yet, as I mostly do landscapes, not portraits, and prefer Fuji's inaccurate colors for that application. (Ektar is a bit more muted color-wise, which yields a nice calming effect: https://goo.gl/photos/jMLY9UwS5Uwn2TQW7 )
One other thing: digital camera tend to get rated on shadow detail, not highlight detail, so their built-in light meters tend to "expose to the right", discarding highlights in favor of collecting more shadow detail. If you meter off an 18% grey card, a real light meter tends to give a shorter exposure than the camera's built-in meter, better preserving highlights. As someone who likes a well-defined sky, I'm betrayed by the camera manufacturers here. (But you'll of course notice it on the screen, and you can just turn the exposure compensation wheel to underexpose, and you're golden. It is not quite so easy with slide film, involving a lot of measurements and very careful spot metering. Therein lies the fun.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_600
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isetta
I mean, I guess it makes sense, since there was a lot of stuff to repair and important infrastructure and industry was probably higher on the to-do list than Cathedral and Courthouse repair. But I hadn't really thought about how long the prominent war-time damage would've lasted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_the_Republic,_Berlin
That was torn down in 2008 and now the new "city palace" is being built in its place, with a facade that is similar to the original palace.
As an example, the paving on the pathways is in a constant state of being repaired because the design is such that the little stone blocks pop out very easily. Many of the side roads are still cobbled (and a nightmare to cycle on). People don't worry about it.
It's almost as if it was all designed to lure one outside.