The Chicago Project -- Day 4 of 5

Day 4 of the Chicago Project shows, more than any other day's image, how dramatically Chicago has grown since 1971. In the original picture, only the Standard Oil Building is in the frame. In the 2012 image, many other skyscrapers have joined the skyline.

Regardless of the image itself, this pairing tells a story about great city management, effective and sustained economic growth, and the diverse and attractive architectural scheme in Chicago.

The original image, from 1971, is not my favorite. From a technical standpoint, the bird is soft and the Standard Oil Building sharp, indicating a shallower depth of field. The Fujichrome film was probably 100 ISO, and on a sunny day that could translate into an aperture of 6.3 for a 1/1,000th of a second exposure. My guess is that this was around f6.3. The digital image below was shot at f10, which is about where the Sigma performs the best, and this aperture yields a very nice sharpness across the entire image's depth.


Photoshop blended the image with some serious and pervasive color and ghost-type issues. But I do like how it blended the park areas from each image.



My goal with this image was to have the old image elements on the left with the new on the right. Each side also contains some images from each image. The middle is a blending ground where the two images meet.