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What is rephotography? Forgotten Tasmania — Transcript · YTtoTranscript

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What is rephotography? Forgotten Tasmania

Forgotten Tasmania · 2,799 words · 14 min read · EN

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Below is the complete, readable transcript of What is rephotography? Forgotten Tasmania by Forgotten Tasmania on YouTube. Read the full text, copy any part you need, or generate a transcript for any video with our free tool.

what is re photography did I am welcome to Forgotten Tasmania I'm John Stephenson to be honest I didn't think there was much more to re photography after you'd said then and now photos I thought that kind of wrapped it up but there's so much more to it and I'd like to tell you about that today I like to start with

Wikipedia because that'll give me a good overview of a topic with some degree of fact-checking and according to wikipedia re photography is the process of photographing a subject again after a period of time has passed in my case that means taking an original Beattie photo finding the exact spot where it was taken and making a new photograph that shows how things have changed but

more importantly how they've stayed the same Wikipedia suggests that re photography dates back to the 1850s but their examples are about using 1850s photos And rephotographing them rather than work that was actually done in the 1850s but by the 1880s there were certainly rephotography work happening a lot Wikipedia does give us a useful

statement about the social use of a photography repeat photographs offer subtle cues about the changing character of social life it says

it seems rephotography can be a kind of social tool as well some rephotography is very casual taken from the same spot but without regard to timing season or weather but some is really precise involving a thorough study of the original image and some serious mathematics and that's what my good friend dr. Jim Palfreyman does so when you give me a photo the first thing

I do is I study it very closely and I try to work out what time of year were looking at first that's actually really important because it helps with the angles of the shadows because if you can get the same time of day and date of year and the location as well spot on the photo the reproduction will pop it

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will look really really good if you're slightly off I found it's just not quite as good to get the seasons you sort of look at the trees and you can get a glimmer of when it's summer or winter or whatever or what the people in the shot might be wearing then I look once I've worked out that the season then I look

at the shadows hopefully there's a shadow there and that then gives me the angle of the Sun and I can from the angle of the Sun if I if it's a location I know precisely I know where that shadow is and I can work out the time of day unless there's a clock in the background we've been a bit lucky with

some recent shots there's been a clock to help us but when there's no clock there the angles of the shadows I can you know use my astrophysics and and work out the time of day and usually to within you know half an hour or so and that's usually enough okay so in winter the Sun rises sort of fairly low in the

Northeast and sets in the northwest in the high summer it rises in the southeast and sets in the southwest and goes quite high in the sky so if you know the season if let's say pretend it's winter I know the Sun is generally pretty low in the sky at that time and then and I've got some apps that can

help me along as well I can dial up the work you know the where the Sun might be in the sky and help me as well so if you can get the season that really really helps because you know it could be midday in winter or nine o'clock in in summer but having said that even at forgetting daylight saving because most

of our shots there's no daylight saving anyway so at noon we know the shadow will be pointing south so I can sort of if I know where South is in the photo I can use that as a guide to work out the time pretty much like a sundial really to be honest the app I like to use is Sun seeker it's a fairly simple and

cheap app but it has the ability that you can dial up any time or date and see where the Sun is in the sky but the other nice little feature is you can hold the phone up and it'll and you can see and it will show you where the sunny is even if it's behind clouds and that's really handy and that can sort of help

me just get the numbers right I could go away and calculate them ourselves so the way I find the spot I think the spot is actually really important because if you actually get it down to within you know 10 20 30 centimeters it will make a massive difference and so what I tend to do is it's trying to line things up and

it's fantastic when you've got old buildings I remember standing what was what he's around about now in salamanca lining up one of the shots and I and I found some old buildings so there was a chimney pot and a corner of a building that were in the original photo and I could get a precise alignment in the

original photo and all I had to do was move around until the corner of that building that chimney pot lined up on yours in the right spot give or take you know unless the bid a road height or something had changed and I was in the middle of the road so it was a bit tough then but yes so lining things up when

you've got old buildings that really helps when you've got lots of scenery and bush and rivers and stuff that we've done on the Derwent River then it comes down to again hues you know you sort of try and line up the heels or something close and a hill in the distance to help as well so anything to line that up is

is what I do it's sometimes it's pretty hard to to get the exact spot if you don't have those reference points when we were doing the CML building or just near the CML building and I was using some windows on the other side of the street and I we found out I couldn't actually get in the right position so it

was a bit of a shame with that particular one it couldn't just quite get there for health and safety reasons but it's fun trying to find those I like that challenge to get this the exact spot when we did Franklin Square that was one of the very first ones that I did and I did that one because we had a clock and I knew the time and from the

bushes and everything around I could pick the time of year and so I thought oh this would be an easy one so I went down at Franklin Square and got where I thought we were but of course the trees had all changed and the streets had changed a bit and things had changed and it was hard to line up in the end and I

took a shot at the time it was the very first one and it was it was good it was a good shot but it turns out it wasn't in the right place and I was not happy so I made you come back and we had another shot another shot at it and yeah

it was you know it took me I think it took me about 20 minutes to decide we're taking lots of shots where the actual camera position was just trying to find something in the photo that I could line up unfortunately it was it was hard because the trees that were you know tiny little skinny things back when the

photo was taken with these massive trees now and blocking things and blocking buildings but in the end I think we got that one in the end and yeah it was quite a nice shot I was having really pleased with that one when we did Cascade gardens that was a challenge and a bit of a disappointment beyond that

finding the spot was really hard because of our friends the trees but also because they've been a lot of redevelopment down there and they changed it a lot and that that was actually it was a fun day trying to find a bit a little bit frustrating because there were times we thought we'd had it

and then we looked and line things up and it wasn't quite right and we moved another you know 400 metres up that you know up the path and it was still we know we weren't 100% sure and that was because the context what the shot was really hard all we had was a river or a creek with some rocks in it and so I was

trying to find the rocks it might sound strange that you think the rocks in a creek might not change very much over 100 years but you know they might not but of course they'd been redevelopment and in possibly even redirection of the river sand lots and lots of new trees so yeah that was a hard one and so I think

I found the spot in the end but it was so different I think it was probably not quite what we wanted but it was fun so sometimes it's actually impossible to get to the spot exactly because things have changed and then probably my favorite one where this was the one of the bridge over in Linda's farm and I

went hunting and looking you know sort of was driving up streets and moving along and and then I got to this spot and I realized oh this is where he was very closely and there was the spot that I needed to be there was a house there so what do you do you knock on the door I put my my business card

out and knocked on the door and this guy answered the fire I answered the door and said look I said I apologized for you know intruding and I said look I'm a photographer and this is the work that I'm doing bla bla bla bla and it turns out that this photo and I had the photo within I could show it to him was taken

from right where your house is now and he goes come on in and he brings with him and up on the wall in his house was the photo because he'd found it somewhere else and he had it there so that was really good and he was absolutely happy to me to stand on his deck and reproduce it as well so that

was that was a good moment actually it was you know people can be really helpful like that sometimes so my started photography was dad had a film SLR and he um I can't remember the brand but I've got the camera still got the camera that dad had he handed to me when and taught me how to use it when I

was probably bout eight years old and so and I learned quite quickly how to you know and it was a completely manual no automatics he told me how to use the light meter and all that so I it was all black and white back then and he also taught me how to develop and print my own black and white film so I did a

little bit of that when I was young you and I met at a college and I did some work with your dad in the studio for a month bit of work experience part of it taking photos the Father Christmas but also being in the lab and I learned a little bit of stuff from him and I the thing I probably learned the most was

his lighting setup and how he did it and that was because Emma does worry about equipment professionals worry about money masters worry about the light you dad worried about the light and that was so I learned that lesson from him mr. Beatty rephotographed Singh's other photographers before him had taken and when he couldn't rephotographed he commissioned an artist Haughton Forest to

recreate the scene with a paintbrush I like to put things in the recreations that were there in the original like cars bikes buses cruise ships and of course a camera bag in honor of my grandfather I don't think pop invented Murray photography but he was certainly redoing to be tea shots as far back as the 1930s pop was a portrait photographer from

Launceston and he was lured to Hobart by mr. Beattie as part of his retirement planning but once pop saw beat his landscape work I think he caught the bug because most of Pop's work is landscape photography and he left the portrait clip to my father pop is remembered for his photos of the bridges across the Derwent River the floating bridge the two bridges and

the Tasman bridge copies of these photographs hang in many Tasmanian homes even 50 years after Pop's passing a lot of rephotography is very sad like we've lost something I'm a bit of an oddball there mine is more a celebration that the wilderness or the old buildings are still there sometimes our celebrate progress same building different attitude social structure progress more

civil rights or whatever there's some great buildings and things but who wants to live in colonial Van Diemen's land with the disease hunger convicts and the way we treated Aboriginal people the fashion is great to look at but who wants to wear a whalebone corset although I would wear a Victorian era suit if I wasn't so worried about what people would think of me the advent of

the smartphone putting a highly capable camera in everyone's pocket has revolutionized rephotography for example the police regularly collect smartphone photos from a crime scene along with security camera footage to check the timeline my wife started photographing the kids in our family every Christmas she posed them all in order of age on the couch over the years

babies came along and older ones weren't able to make it because they had families of their own but we have a great record of them growing up and I can say to my son see your cousin didn't grow tall until he was 17 so there's still time for you rephotography has been used in documentary films they fade

the photo to reveal what stood in this place not that long ago there's even organised rephotography projects where the public is encouraged to photograph scenes and submit their photos for a 4d timeline there's a big project called retake Melbourne and I dare you to visit Abbey Road and not grab a selfie on the pedestrian crossing so Rephotography

is really popular we just don't call it by that name it's just having a bit of fun doing it then in our photo I use an app called photos then and now it lets me overlay the live camera with the historic photo I can line them up and fade between the two I've tried a few apps but photos then and now seems to

work pretty well it'll be nice to have a few more manual camera controls but you know I can add lenses and things like that to the iPhone if I really have to you can try rephotography too download a photo from our website get the photos then and now app or another one and it's really easy especially if you know

the place where the photo is like if it's of your own house I've had plenty of people with older houses buy a Beattie photo to hang on the wall next to their modern photo they make great conversation pieces I think that's one of the biggest reasons people buy Beattie photos today and you can still buy Beattie photos from our website so there you have it I

learned a lot about rephotography making this episode and I hope you got something out of it too I'll catch you in the next one Cheers