I like to try and reproduce views taken in 1930s-40s or before. To this end I have several old travel guides that I use when I am visiting different parts of the country. Because of their age I believe the photos are out of copyright but if I am wrong and you are the copyright holder then please contact me.
For this set of images I visited Stokesay Castle – a fortified manor house in Shropshire managed by English Heritage. I took with me a copy of the photo I wanted to recreate and was given directions by the kind people in the visitor centre. Below I show the ‘then and now’ photos of the castle starting with the old photo I wanted to recreate:
First I tried lining the original image up with this photo:
With some basic, rough alignment ended up with these two images which I am showing using a ‘Before and After’ comparison slider:
The alignment it somewhat off. A little of this is due to the fact I needed to walk a little further around the pond (but this did look far enough at the time). Doing so would have meant dropping down a few feet over a ledge and also risk losing the right side of the castle to the trees. But I was puzzled by the different perspective.
Just for interest I put the old photo in the middle of the new one to show it in the modern landscape:
I then tried another new photo and used different manipulations to try and get better alignments. This is the best I could do:
The alignment is better but I had to do some quite extensive ‘stretching’ to correct perspective differences. I am suspecting that some perspective changes were originally made when the print was being created in the darkroom (I have tried this in the past when I had a darkroom and an enlarger with bellows that could be manipulated).
An interesting exercise. I took a few other views on my trip to that part of the country which I have yet to process.