Just for a change from shooting wildlife, I was looking for inspiration and struck gold with the discovery of an archive in my local library of photographs of Auckland city dating back to the turn of the last century. Curious to see how the place has evolved, and as a challenge, I decided to replicate as closely as possible the images taken at that time to contrast the city then and now.
One of the big challenges is to establish precisely from where photos were taken. Obviously, these were taken with different format cameras - mostly large plate - so I had to play around to get the similar fields of view.
On top of that there was a non-technical complication... the city is much, much taller now and certain parts have been drastically terraformed - such as significant land in-fill along the waterfront and demolition of a couple of volcanoes for construction materials. The city is built on a live field of 50 volcanoes, the last of which erupted only about 700 years ago.
The old image is from the Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections and taken by H Winkleman around 1901
This next image was taken of what was then the Grand Hotel, a very up-market establishment that today has retained its façade but not much else! It is now a very exclusive hotel and I am trying to gain access to get a couple of shots to match those Winkleman took from the top balcony on the front.
