To Blend or to Slide continued….

If you have been wandering around South Street the last couple weeks and seen a lone person taking photographs with her phone, that was probably me.  As I wrote in my blog from November 13^th, I have been attempting to create “before and after” contrasts of built heritage in London's SoHo community, using modern photographs compared to their vintage counterparts. I have been focusing entirely on the Victoria Hospital, my focus for the Hear, Here Public History project, as there are truly endless numbers of archival photos and stories surrounding this space in the SoHo community.

An important part of this before and after project is to try, as closely as possible, to take photos similar to the original vintage photographs. This is not an easy task. This project reminds me of my undergraduate studio art courses, attempting but not quite succeeding to create two-point perspective drawings of buildings.

It was also a somewhat disheartening experience wandering the marshy lands where the hospital once stood and looking at the state of the boarded-up buildings still there. A man waiting at the bus stop saw me walking and taking photos, and oddly enough this inspired him to start taking photos of the old buildings as well. It was incredibly disappointing to see a group of children trying to break into the old Nurse's Residence, even though security regularly comes onto the property. The sunlight for photography was perfect, however, and I took many photos of the buildings that (I believed at the time) were in line with archival images.

The Colborne Street building from ca. 1899 is the last standing building from the original Victoria Hospital.

The next step was uploading these images into the software. The past few weeks, I have been learning about and experimenting with comparison slider programs and Processing 3, with mixed success. As I discussed previously, WordPress does have applications such as Image Comparison Slider, which is a Plugin that can be installed directly into your WordPress website or blog. HOWEVER, WordPress requires upgrading your account to ‘Business’  in order to install Plugins… which I discovered costs over $300 for the year, up front… and as a graduate student, this is not financially feasible.

Thankfully I had researched other options as backup! The website I have been experimenting with is called Juxtapose, and it does not require purchasing a Plugin to embed into a blog or website.

You can use Dropbox to insert your photos into Juxtapose. I opened my old Dropbox account, and from there was introduced to a photo editing program called PIXLR.  This program was fantastic, as I was able to edit the two before and after photographs prior to putting them into Juxtapose so they were able to line up successfully.  The “transparency” feature allowed me to layer one photo on top of the other so I could review how closely the two images matched.

Screenshot of Juxtapose, https://juxtapose.knightlab.com/#preview-embed

Screenshot of my edits for the War Memorial Children's Hospital on PIXLR, https://pixlr.com/x/

Unfortunately, as much as you edit the photos, if your camera angle was off from the beginning, the two images simply will not line up correctly. In the below before and after Juxtapose of the old Medical School building located at the corner of South and Waterloo Streets, I was initially thrilled when the photo I took was perfectly timed so that the van driving by matched up with the old car in the 1921 photograph. However, when I placed the photos into Juxtapose, even with editing in PIXLR, the perspective is off. I found it interesting that both photos show the building in a state of construction, but for very different reasons.

The before and after for the War Memorial Children’s Hospital was more successful. While the two images do not line up exactly, they are very close, and the contrast shows the building thriving in 1922 as it was first opening, versus how it appears today, empty with broken and boarded windows:

The bad news is that the majority of the photographs I have taken do not line up with the vintage photographs as well as I would like, which means I will have to go back to the hospital lands and try again. I have a superior camera to use this time compared to my terrible Motorola cellphone, thanks to a classmate (thanks Sean!). I will reattempt to get the perspective angles lined up as closely as possible.

   

Through all of this, I have also been experimenting with Processing 3 which has provided its own set of challenges. The blend feature has so much potential for this project. While Juxtapose works well comparing the buildings that are still intact, blend works better with the built heritage that is now demolished. The ghostly image of the Victoria Hospital appearing and disappearing within the now empty space I think is more effective than a the before and after contrast. I also think the blend feature would work well with photographs of people working and residing in these in these spaces to show the change in use and purpose of the buildings.

The North Wing of the Victoria Hospital on South Street ca. 1941

The empty grass lands where the Victoria Hospital on South Street once stood

Of course, there have been a few hurdles with Processing 3. I was able to use the coding from the "blend example" provided in the program, import my own images, and then insert the coding for these images into the Processing 3 Sketch. This was the first result:

Screenshot of my first attempt at "Blending" in Processing 3 Sketch of the War Memorial Children's Hospital

The image was far too large, and I could not figure out why this was the case. With the help of a classmate (thanks Hetty!), I reduced the size of the initial images, embedded them into the coding a second time, and the result was more successful: 

Screenshot of my resized second attempt at "Blending" in Processing 3 Sketch for the War Memorial Children's Hospital

Unfortunately, while I’ve managed to embed the html for the Juxtapose comparisons successfully into this blog post (although there were some sizing and picture quality issues), I do not know how to do this for a Processing Sketch, which is why these images are uploaded in this blog as screenshots. My end goal is to tell the before and after story of the hospital buildings with both Juxtapose and blending in Processing 3 on my own website. I have one more week to make this work!! 

From my research for the Hear, Here project, I have noticed that for many people, the loss of the hospital is reminiscent of losing a part of their own story. It makes sense that many people have a deep connection to the hospital through major life events, whether births, deaths, illnesses, or work. Interestingly, I discovered my own family connection with the Victoria Hospital on the weekend. As it turns out, my mother was born there, and she still has her unofficial, and very crumpled, birth certificate that was given to my grandmother at the hospital. Although I knew my mother was born in London, it never occurred to me that it was at the old Victoria Hospital in SoHo. London is becoming an increasingly smaller world.