As a small side note, I would love to help you write up an in-depth article on producing your images and how things worked out (what worked, what didn’t, etc) to publish here if you’re up for it.
More related, Hugin can work wonders bending things to fit if you’re ok with some level of pixel bending. It may be some manual work depending on how tight you need the alignment. (Of course, a more automated align_image_stack might be fine for many instances).
On the narrow gauge railroad forum where I spend time, a couple of folk do then-n-now photography of scenes where railroads did/still run. Regarding these, what I’ve found is that precise alignment isn’t so important as the placement of key structural or geographic components. Here’s an example:
http://ngdiscussion.net/phorum/read.php?1,356301,356847#msg-356847
John Fielder published a book of these, going out to W.H.Jackson locations and imaging the present:
Note the Fielder page shows him with a view camera and a printed picture, eye-balling it.
FWIW…
Right on schedule I could hear the train coming, although it was around the corner so I couldn’t see it. It didn’t sound like it was slowing down. The creative director started yelling at me “He’s not stopping. GET OUT!” I grabbed the cameras and ran for the tunnel entrance. I couldn’t get completely out and had to press up agains the rocks while the train went past. The train crew never even saw us.
We then decided that it would be a lot smarter to wait until the train stopped, then go into the tunnel and take the picture, which is what we did a few days later. The final shot was used extensively for their advertising.
Hi Pat, yes let’s do that. I know we talked maybe doing a couple of articles some time ago - one my workflow for scanning the old negatives with a DSLR, then using open source software to process then. The other you mentioned you’d like to do would focus on my father’s photography, which covered an incredible variety of material dating from the mid 1930s through the 1970s. It seems that his first major assignment was to cover the 1936 Berlin OIympics - really haunting images.
Glad you weren’t hurt. 
Love the train shot. The cloud top-right really makes it. Was that luck, or good planning, or darkroom trickery?
Which reminds me that back in the day, many roll-film (ie larger than 35mm) cameras, and certainly plate-film (eg 5x4) cameras had lens movements: tilt and shift. Even quite cheap cameras often had movements.
So, beware that “then” photos might have used movements, eg using Scheimpflug to get distant mountains and close-up ground both in focus, or rising lens so mountains don’t shrink when the camera points upwards.
If this happens, a modern camera may not give an image that can be aligned without digital tinkering.
Yes, that will make it more complicated. For those shots I’ll probably be satisfied with just approximate alignment. For my father’s photography, he used a variety of cameras: 35mm, 6x6 cm, 6x9 cm, 3x4 in, 4x5 inch and 5x7. At least with the 35mm and 6x6 he wouldn’t have been using tilts and shifts. The Vallarta shot, for instance, is 6x6, probably from a Rollei twin-lens reflex.
This was back before digital cameras so I shot it on film and scanned it. The sky and the mountain were not manipulated other than maybe a bit of brightness, contrast and colour, but I did a fair bit of digital imaging in the rest of the shot. First, the tunnel had bushes grown up along some of the side and top that weren’t there in the original Nick Morant shot, so I cloned them out. Then the front of the train, as it was close to the tunnel, was about five stops darker than the mountain scene. I bracketed the exposure and cloned in a properly exposed engine into the scene from a different scan.
Then the creative director mentioned that the interior walls of the tunnel had no texture as they had in the Morant shot. In the intervening years the soot from the diesels had blackened the walls so the cement was covered. I scouted around for a shorter tunnel where the soot didn’t accumulate, walked in about the same distance, shot that tunnel and replaced these tunnel walls from my original shot.
These were the early days of Photoshop. No digital cameras, no raw files - you shot film and scanned it. In any case, it worked and they loved the result. Ironically, a member of the public complained that the shot was digitally manipulated because he claimed that a dark line along the edge of the mountain against the sky was a seam between two shots. I laughed at that because the line was an actual shadow on the mountain and that area of the picture was one of the few areas that WASN’T manipulated.
I’ve been following this thread with half an ear, but like to point you to
HTH,
Flössie
Moin @floessie!
MagicLantern is a good idea!
ML is one of the few things I really miss from
my Canon era.
MfG
Claes in Lund, Schweden
Aligning the image with hugin might work really well if you manually choose your points. Hugin will take care of all the tilt, great idea
With some cameras (mine included) you can pre-load a picture on the memory card and use that as a start for a multi-exposure sequence. In that mode the “then” photo can be displayed in an overlay on (or under) the live view or EVF “now” image to be taken. Of course once the alignment is done you can lock that down on a tripod, skip the multiple exposure and just take a standard picture. In theory that would work (the fact that it works on the EVF might allow more precise work than the back LCD screen). I have to check to see if this works in practice, I never tried. FYI this info is based on my Lumix G80 instruction manual. The pre-loaded image has to be taken in RAW by the same camera so you might need to re-shoot your image negative (or a positive printout) in RAW with the same camera for this to work?
That’s the kind of solution that would be ideal. I played around a bit with my Nikons but there doesn’t seem to be a way of viewing the live view over top of the picture on the card. So far it seems the best solution with my gear is to print off the “then” picture onto transparent film and put it over top of the LCD screen on my phone or a tablet. The Android app Camera Connect and Control seems to work well and is only $10 Cdn. It would be even better if it had an overlay feature or even the ability to instantly switch from the “then” to the “now” pictures instead of sliding the image to the next one.
Pat,
In December I spent a couple weeks in Puerto Vallarta and had 3 goals: (1) Get some sun and escape the Canadian winter), (2) Do a series of “then and now” shots using my father’s beautiful images of PV in the early 1950s as the “then”, (3) Set up an exhibition of my father’s work in PV.
(1) Success!
(2) Failure. There were simply too many changes for some of the key shots to work.
(3) Success. I’m working with the City of PV Cultural Dept and one of PV’s business leaders on an exhibition, tentatively scheduled for the end of May this year.
I’ll be using Rawtherapee and Gimp for the file preparations. I can use a Nikon D800 or D810 to shoot the original B&W negs, but I’m hoping that Nikon Canada will lend me a D850 for that.
I’ll keep you informed.
This is fantastic! Please keep me apprised of your progress, and if you think you might be able to spare some time it might make an awesome article to publish on the website and raise awareness of what you’re up to!
Will do Pat.
Although this thread seems to be old now, here are my 2 cents. I have been doing Then and Now pictures for years now. For me the only way it has worked is to create a grid and vertical helper lines connecting remote points with points closer up on the original picture and either print these or take them on your tablet/mobile phone with you. Overlaying on the screen is of little help as the original picture was taken with a different focal length and the scenery was way different. In some cases it is necessary to take a picture only to find out what reference points can still be used and then go back again. With the picture with grid lines you can walk around and you’ll soon see matching points and also see if you have the correct distance.
For aligning pictures of different size you can use popims, in popims you can set markers on on the same points on both pictues and it will then align and rescale the picture. http://logicnet.dk/PopimsAnimator/
The free version as offered for download does not allow rotating and keeping an uncropped version. However the owner of the Web Site can provide a version that allows rescaling and rotating.
[Here is my colleciton ofThen and Now Pictures on Flickr]
(Re-Photography | Flickr)
Here is an example from an old Postcard. The yellow and orange lines are just a 6x6 grid and the green lines and circles have been added manually.
Just stumbled on this in the middle of the “Then and Now photos - alignment” thread. Very interesting, and deserves to have its own thread. How did the rest of your tests go?
This is so cool. I think this is perfect.
Firefox is scaring me when I try your app’s link.
That’s because the page cannot be called with https, but only with http. I have corrected the link accordingly.
