The wall was constructed to prevent East German and Berliners from crossing over into West Berlin and West Germany. The most famous of checkpoints along the wall was known as 'Checkpoint Charlie' and the first 5 colour photos all show parts of the checkpoint. Over the course of the Cold war, there were numerous altercations at this checkpoint, most famously: the Berlin Crisis of 1961 in which US and Soviet tanks had a 'stand off' on each side of the border. I have included a photo capturing this stand off to the right.
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My first step was to take the photos of the soldiers by checkpoint charlie. I inverted the colour on photoshop then printed them. To invert the image, i used cmd+I in photoshop. I then printed off the images, then photocopied onto assatape. I then placed the assatape over light reactive paper in the sun for 10 mins. After the sun went down, i used the class UV light as a replacement for the sun.
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The image on the right was taken during the Blitz and the one below in January 2018. They are both taken on the Northbound Northern line platform at Elephant and Castle. My next step will be to combine the two images giving an idea of the past compared to present. Up until this point, I felt my work was at a standard but was not rewarding or as good as it could be. I decided from here on it needed to be different.
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My first step was to paste the picture from ww2 over the modern photo. The first issue i faced was that the old image was very different to mine and the people walking in. Instead of trying to just combine the two, i decided to create a fading gif, similar to the ones from the soldier at checkpoint charlie.
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The original Reichstag dome was destroyed in the Reichstag fire of 1933 and during the Soviet bombing of Berlin and attack in 1945. The Dome was finished and opened in April 1999 and from the dome and roof there is a 360 degree view of all Berlin. The Reichstag is also the German legislative building. The damage to the Reichstag dome is shown to the right. The rebuilt dome shown below is clearly far different to how it appeared in late 1945. This shows very clearly how even a building can be restored.
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To start off, I cut out and coped the Gherkin, by doing this i was able to edit and change the colours of the rest of the image without affecting the main focus area. My first edit was to use the lens blur tool on the two other buildings.
Following this, I decided to remove colour from the two buildings, doing this made the Gherkin even bolder.
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In response, I travelled to Balham to photograph the same location. One issue i encountered when attempting to recreate the Bus photo was that it was taken from one story up. Therefore preventing me from matching up the photos in the same manner. However, it was easy to identify where the 'Walk The Barratt Way' building stood and it provided a clear indication of what to photograph. Recreating the photo of the underground explosion was also difficult as my camera lacked the wide lens to capture as wide of an image as the old one.
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My first step to creating the image was to make sure that the old and new image were the same size. My image, as shown to the right, was far larger than the original from the war.
I scaled my image down to 25% of its original size to counteract this. The results were near perfect as the Baratt Way Building now almost perfectly lined up with my image from today. I then changed my opacity level to 56% to line up the buildings and to allow me to identify what parts of the original image should be kept. After this, I rounded off the corners to give more of a natural feel to the image, rather than just an image that had been copied and pasted straight on to another. |
At this stage i thought the image done. As always I noticed one more small thing: the child at the bottom left. Unlike the previous issues, this was small and quick to fix and i did so through the use of the great 'crop' tool. Again after this i found at the bottom of the image, the old image was overlapping the car too much. I again fixed this by erasing some of the old image with a fine eraser. As well as the car, i noticed that my clone stamping out the pole looked slightly off. I started off by copy and pasting a tile from further down in order to rectify this. This kind of manoeuvre usually and will end up with me making the problem worse and worse so i decided to leave it as it is and it is not the subject of the photo and only if the photo is intensely scrutinised would be noticed
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