After a year of time and expense poured into This Odd House, I have largely succeeded in bringing it up to working order, up to code, and a bit closer to my esthetic goal for clean, simple, contemporary styling. The rooms in the house feel open and light, the doors and windows now work, and the heating, cooling and plumbing systems are functional.
It occurred to me that someone coming to the After Party, who had not been to the Before Party, might not think much about it: why is anyone making such a fuss over a house with newly painted walls and clean windows? As one of the Before Party attendees exclaimed last year, “I’m glad I came, because otherwise I would never believe this!” So I set out to make some before and after comparison photos.
I have often enjoyed coffee table books with photographic comparisons of landscapes and buildings over time. The photographer starts with a set of old photographic plates, sometimes from a century back, and then tries to infer where and how the picture was taken. I decided to do a similar project starting with my before pictures from a year back.
I found that this is actually quite a challenge. Even having detailed information about the originals, what lens was used at what focal length, the exposures etc, and having the same equipment that took the photo, it turns out that getting the camera back to the exact same viewpoint is quite hard.
I was able to compare the digital image on my camera back to the before photo displayed on my laptop screen and make trial and error adjustments, eventually arriving at an approximate match. Yet some vantage points seemed impossible to reproduce. Perhaps my tripod could not reach the same spot that I had taken the hand-held original, and my patience in searching for it eventually ran out. In other cases, the structure had changed so much that there was nothing really to make a match with.
In the end I am pleased to have a rough comparison of before and after. I could now explain how much had happened in the last year to those who had not had the pleasure of seeing it at the Before Party.
Click a thumbnail below to enter the slide show mode. Each scene comes in before-and-after pairs; you can toggle them back and forth.
