I had the pleasure of running a little photo shoot today for a local guy who wanted to recreate an image of professional mourners taken about 120 years ago . Morbid? No. The sitter showed me an image where one of the mourners was his doppelgänger. If you hadn’t known that nearly five generations of time separated the man in the original shot and my client, they could have been twins. As far as he knows, they are not related. Stylised facial hair helps carry off the look, but really its the quality of a vintage image that helps most.
The photo I viewed was a copy (probably of another copy) and consequently, the quality across the copies affects the final version. Added to this, the optics of the cameras were not always great (certainly on the new ranges of everyday cameras made by Kodak Eastman) and processing of film and prints was not always carried out in the best conditions. Overall, its a wonder you could recognised anyone at all in a 120 year old snapshot. Even so; my client certainly has an uncanny resemblance to the long dead man in the photo…
The trick now is to make the new, digital shot look like the original. Digital cameras are nothing short of awesome (and the tech in my main camera body is already 4 years old) showing every hair, every pore, every wrinkle. It’s a matter of coming back on that now to convert to black and white and soften the look to match the vintage shot. Once the post production is done (trying to create the same feel as a hundred year old photo has its difficulties!) I’ll post a version here.