Cape Town Morph

It’s often difficult to know what people think when I post stuff like this. The reasoning behind my confusion is that is seems that many of my readers are tech-savvy, early-adopter, social media users.
And I first caught sight of this short video yesterday evening. Which means that they probably did too.

Fortunately, most of them don’t have the time, energy or inclination to leave a comment saying “Saw this ages ago – boring!” or whatever. There are those, however, who don’t live in Cape Town or South Africa (and will therefore probably not be interested anyway) or don’t hang around on Twitter or Facebook and will not have seen this.

Therefore, I am posting this for them. Oh, and for me.

This is 129 years in 30 seconds (I nearly typed “30 seconds in 129 years” then, but it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as interesting) and here’s the story:

I was recently commissioned to recreate a panorama of Cape Town and Table Mountain, captured from Signal Hill in 1884 by W.F.H. Pocock.

Fortunately I managed to find the exact same spot where the original photos were captured, so I was able to shoot my modern version of Mr. Pocock’s amazing 1884 panorama. And fortunately I correctly guessed the focal length that was used to capture the original photos, so my panorama came out looking almost exactly the same as the original.

Lots of fortuity there, and lots more detail here, including the phrase “Then I had this crazy idea…”.