Twenty Second: The Salon, Spa and Fitness Studio - Wausau, WI - 1968/2012

Kristy - owner of The Salon, Spa & Fitness Studio at 530 McClellan Street in Wausau - commissioned me to do a Then & Now of her building!  This one was the most drastic perspective and distortion level change I have ever done, the reason being is from the exact location the old photographer was standing, you can barely even see the building at all, as there is a huge tree over hanging in the front yard.  So what I had to do was shoot from a much lower respective, about 10 feet to the left - so using what I have learned from my experience with this process, what i actually did was flip flopped sides of the lenses to try to make up for that gap in perspective and distortion change.  What this means technically, is for the right side of the image, i used the left side of my lens - Top of image, the bottom part of my lens.  This allowed me to greatly close that gap and allow me to fine-tune it in post production!

Twenty First: State Street - Capitol View - Madison, WI 1939/2012

I decided to make a 2 day trip to Madison one of these last weekends solely focused on Then & Now's.  I spent some time in the beautiful building that houses the Wisconsin State Historical Museum....just some amazing architecture to gawk at.  I begun my research and came across another re-photographer warrior's book named Double Take: A Rephotographic survey of Madison, Wisconsin - by photographer Zane Williams; this book helped me immensely with my research, solely for the reason that it allowed me to see, without being there, what is actually there now, and get an idea of what is possible, and what images would be best for my style of Then & Now.  

Once scouting on location for the Now shot, it was actually particularly difficult as I only had the digital version on my iPhone screen, in the bright daylight, I waited for the sun to be in just the right position, to allow the shadow cast on the dome of the Capitol to line up.  This was a very exciting part of the post production when I was able to fade the two times over the Capitol, splitting the statues and the dome itself into a blend of black and white and color - its difficult to decipher which is which.  This image is also great as it shows a 50/50 blend of Then & Now's architecture on each side of the image.  

Then & Now goes PINK!