The Chicago Project -- Day 1 of 5

Since February, I've been working on a project called The Chicago Project. Spurred by slides my girlfriend's father took in Chicago between 1971 and 1973, I decided to replicate some of his shots. In April 2012 -- 41 years after the original slides -- I went back to my home town to replicate the images.


This first image is the original 1971 image my girlfriend's father took walking north on the (then named) Michigan Avenue Bridge a few days after it opened. Note the classic old car, people with fabulous plaid pants, brown-glass globe lamps -- these are classic 70's cheese. Even the traffic cones lack modernity. Of course, today's traffic cones are hyper-obnoxious orange(?), which is contemporary cheese.

You'll notice in the re-take that the buildings are mostly the same with a new addition on the left (top left, peaking out from behind the old building I forget the name of.) Also, astute readers will notice that on the right, a sign used to be in front of that onion-top.

But more likely you'll notice the Toyota Prius, flags instead of lamps, and other contemporary cheese. Yes, I just called a Prius cheese. What remains the same, unchanged in 41 years, are the buildings that exist in both images. Stone or concrete, these structures will -- unless demolished for future progress -- likely outlast everyone who ever reads this blog. Buildings are humanity's longest-lasting monument (though pollution will be our longest-lasting legacy.)

In Photoshop, I opened both images in a stack and resized the old film image to match the new image's height. Because of the different aspect ratio in my lens versus the Takumar, I then corrected the geometry in my image to match the original. Being a slightly higher resolution image (14.6 megapixels instead of 12.5 or so), and also being a native digital file, geometry modifications delivered better results with my image.

I then manually blended the two images. With my image on top, I used the eraser tool, set on brush, and between 5% and 80% opacity (depending on the need and my stylistic ideas) and went to town erasing some of the modern content to blend the images. After that, I undid all the erased areas and had Photoshop blend the images. Today, as for the rest of the week, I'll show you the Photoshop-blended image first then my image.






As you can see, Photoshop yielded unsatisfactory results in this case, using automation. The manually blended image allowed me to keep people as ghosts, do the same for cars, and even blend the old and new building images selectively. Note that most of the onion-topped building is new, but it has the old sign. The flags are present, but so, too, are ghostly renditions of the globes. The 70s people are walking along the bridge, but so, too, are ghosts of the modern people.

Tomorrow we'll take a look at an image of one of the bridge's entry columns, a stone brick structure with a bas relief and some people.