Now and Then...

A better day today, with wall to wall sun, little breeze to talk of and spent all of it indoors! Today was an auragraph course - learning to see people's aura and then creating a visual representation on paper (I could already see them, but had never created an auragraph before). More on what an auragraph is in a later blog.

I had seen an interesting photo set on the BBC website where old pictures of towns were superimposed on modern day pictures to represent of how it looks now and how it looked then on one photograph. So we (my son John and I) thought we would try to reproduce this effect and here are the results:

This is the original photograph taken just after 1900 of Queens Victoria's Square in Hull , so named because a statue of Her Majesty sits in the square - just to the left of the picture.

This is the modern day photograph, taken by me from, as far as we can tell from the various angles and positions of the buildings, the exact spot from where the original was taken. The difficulty is finding the right focal length of the original lens setting.

This is the fascinating result of putting the two pictures together showing John's skill using Adobe Photoshop CS4.


As you can see in comparing the pictures, there's very little left of that part of the city other than the buildings to the far right and Queen Victoria's statue to the left although the original building lines were retained. The change came not because of modern development, but because of the persistent and unremitting bombing of the city in World War ll by the Luftwaffe; 'that North Eastern town,' as the broadcasts and newspapers reported when the nation was told of the bombing, and so called to protect the identity of the strategic importance of the docks to the nation's survival.

My Grandfather was an auxiliary fireman in Hull during the war and he had some tales to tell, both harrowing and darkly funny. But that's for another day.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend

Chat soon

Ta-ra