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Artist Photoshops Scenes From WWII Into Present Day
Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov has taken old World War II photos and photoshopped them over the locations in present day. The scenes from places like Prague, Vienna, and Moscow are incredibly well done and a neat way to appreciate history.
It's a great way to remember past events by envisioning them through today's eye. Very cool.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
This is probably the most interesting use of photoshoping I've seen yet. By seeing the conditions of the streets and buildings merged straight into modern times, you really get a sense of how war-torn the world was at the time.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
The first one (on the stairs) was the best.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
These are also pretty good:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/31199746@N02/sets/72157622452249309/
In Soviet Russia, history Photoshops you?
I had to. This is likely the only time that tired "in soviet russia" joke is topical.
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That's an intriguing way to put these old pictures into context (or to give historic meaning to present-day buildings). Even more interesting is the effect of historic pictures in color: Somehow the grayscale pictures create a distance that isn't really there. The Empire That Was Russia is a collection of color pictures from Russia during the first decade of the 20th century. They were taken as sequences of individual exposures with color filters.
Those are simply awesome!
The sad thing is, if you're under the age of 30, the vast majority of Americans can't relate to WWII in the least. You ask the average American on the street and they don't know the difference between WWI, WWII, Korean War, Vietnam War, or the Gulf War.
Plus, even young aviation enthusiasts tend to have a low regard and no interest for any aircraft which isn't jet powered. Meaning, another area of interest which now has a complete disconnection from WWI and WWII history.
The best part about this is the fact that they had to recreate the exact angle of the original photos. Great Job!
whats a photshop?
portfolio
They didn't do a great job blending the new and old together. I guess that was their artistic choice, but I don't like it.
There's always someone saying things should or shouldn't be in idle but surely this is one of the cases where it shouldn't be?
There's been nothing but positive reviews of this guy's work here so far (and one Soviet Russia joke)
Unless those photos were photoshopped by a retarded 4-year-old with limited eyesight on one eye - I don't see how can those be regarded as anything but pathetic.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
You've cut off all their feet!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IRX2WTWvlQ
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SA goons do this all the time.
Gets really quite eerie when the pictures are displayed in a software capable of switching to greyscale. Not "better" of course, the contrast was surely also the point...but interesting, more blended.
Though it does make the photos more distant, I guess - doesn't help with how, while being a small kid, I thought for some time that the world had to be so sad place in the past, without colors ;) (I apparently missed the existence of color paintings/etc.; and, in retrospect, wasn't very wrong; in some twisted way...)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Interesting start, but methinks has a ways to go. As others note, it's mostly just rough masking one photo onto another.
Methinks the effect would be more striking if the foreground characters were crisply masked onto the background photo, with a broader blending of striking background distinctions (rubble). Don't just have a soldier fade into the modern setting.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I'm sorry, I think it's stupid
begin troll ... Gulf of Mexico before and after the spil ...
end troll
He's done quite a few: http://sergey-larenkov.livejournal.com/
I recognise a few of the places in the photos, and would really like to know where the others are. If there isn't a page identifying them somewhere, shall we make a list here?
I'll start: sergeylarenkov12.jpg shows Soviet soldiers in front of the Reichstag building, Berlin.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Never thought that possible. And about 'war? What chicks ever been to war, not counting Faker Jessica?
Finally a good idle post...
The photographer's photoshop skills are not much better than the average PS user but I think where these doctored photographs would resonate most is with people wo actually know the places in the pictures. I do not know them so they have little meaning for me.
And come on, it is not like WWII is ancient history. It is just one average lifetime ago.
Shamefully there is still war being waged lots of places in the world at any given time. I think pictures from current conflicts would have a lot more impact and would not require doctoring!
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Here is a digital reconstruction of the city of ruins in 1945: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXD51CY8DkA Google Earth historical imagery also has aerial photos of Warsaw from '30s, 1945 and present.
Thanks for the link. It's a shame the original link didn't have it. Good stuff. This one in particular gave me some chills: http://pics.livejournal.com/sergey_larenkov/pic/000029eg/
It's a great idea, but the execution is absolutely awful. The guy clearly spent time getting the angle of the contemporary photos right, but was completely sloppy with his production work. It looks like he got lazy, or he's not particularly good with Photoshop. Instead of just going with messy fades, he should have cropped the imposed images with more precision, so that it looked like those old scenes were more integrated as opposed to being merely superimposed. It would have been more striking and would have given these compositions are more otherworldly feel. Although, my personal preference would have been to shoot the new scenes in black and white and then composed the two together so that they blended more seamlessly, like the two time periods had become one.
Obviously faked. You can see these are two different pictures! Come back when you learn Photoshop.
I argue that "snobbery" is only true when the favored condition actually has some merit of some kind.
The condition described here is more like the kind of cognitive dissonance described in (I think it was) Escher, Goedel, Bach, where the robot insists that one recording of a symphony is more pleasing than another, because of the aesthetic qualitites of the patterns of the grooves in the vinyl discs.
So is the robot a snob, or, deaf to the actual auditory content and unfit to judge by normal human standards?
There are all kinds of people who have nothing to be snobby about, yet act supercilious all the same.
Say it right: "Nuc-le-ah Powah".
I think this is quite easily the best thing I've ever seen on idle. Thanks!
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
I lived near "A bridge to far" and in some movies, that is very eary. You realize your house is one of the landing fields. But then, I used to often go past a spot in the woods were if you went of the bicycle path a little bit, down, there was a small monument were people were killed by the germans.
If a german asks the way, I point them in the wrong direction. It is how I was raised. I might be silly after so many decades, but it is better then forgetting.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It should be worth noting that the "photoshopping" means using Adobe Photoshop. Retouching is the word for a general process of photo modification regardless of the software used. In short, every time someone says "photoshopped", they are advertising Adobe Photoshop for no compensation. :)
War happened, in Europe, and people who lived through it are still alive and a part of the mass consciousness. One of the reasons Europeans are less turned on by war than US-anians.
Somebody from the eastern USA needs to trek out to the Civil War battlefields and try this. All the Mathew Brady photos are in the public domain.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Despite the lack of technical skill, the artist achieved the goal of having me feel that I was standing in another's shoes.
I am guessing here, but I am quite certain that you were actually moved by the original art and authenticity of the old photos he picked for their "power".
Kinda like how an old song sung by an "American Idol" star doesn't get better - it was good to begin with. At best, it will be "OK". At worst... well...
And it works the same way for "professionals" too.
And no amount of hardware can make an artist out of a hack. Particularly not a tablet in this case.
To fix those, one would need to use some actual elbow grease PLUS something the "artist" clearly lacks - the eye of a photographer.
Cause those photos he used are not photographs. Those are snapshots.
Not a single impressive point in any of them. They are completely expressionless and "dead".
Why? Cause he was taking photos of dead things - buildings. Whoever was taking those old photos was taking photos of living people.
Living people doing "important things". Meaningful things. Things worth being preserved for posterity.
In the new photos people are there simply by accident. Utterly meaningless and completely unmotivated.
Those photos don't contrast - they clash.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Do not visit this page as if its Photoshop Friday on SomethingAwful, or Worth1000. You will have a sense of disappointed.
I believe the artist has approached this to provide an interpreted contrast between what a 15 year old sees today in his town, and what happened in that exact spot some 70 years ago.
This means there is no seamless transitions. But a conceptual overlay.
The images are striking for their impact.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
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There are some old photographs of my town in an ice cream parlor down the street. I wonder if they'd let me borrow and scan them. I'd love to take a shot at this, though it wouldn't have the same emotional impact.
Could be effective to get people over the "It could never happen here / now" mentality.
Nice work..!!
Interesting idea, very bad execution. Sure, next to a geek armed with Gimp they seem good, but this should not be the comparing standard.
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"If a german asks the way, I point them in the wrong direction. It is how I was raised. I might be silly after so many decades, but it is better then forgetting."
You are so utterly wrong to do this. You cannot put the blame on people generations younger than those who commited the crimes. Even at the time, it wasn't even all Germans who committed crimes, and suggesting that is just plain wrong.
My grandad was in the British SAS and my Nana in the army in WWII and im damn proud of that, and the fact that my British ancesters stood up to Hitler when very few others did. I was also raised to mock the Germans, which is understandable having grandparents who were in the war and obviosly biased against Germans, but I have a brain, and I use it to make my own judgements as I go through life, and that mocking period ended when I reached teenage years. I would never consider treating present day Germans as if they had comitted the crimes! Or even painting all early 40's era Germans with the same brush (look at Schindler). We are all descended from bloody Africa anyway, and national bouderies, in the sense of using them to dictate whether a nation is "good" or "bad" is ridiculous. Having myself emmigrated to a non-English speaking country later in life, I can attest firsthand to the fact that underneath our 'national identities' we are generally all the same.
It's true that we should never forget what happened so that it never gets repeated, and that we should always be on our guard for leaders of nations who want to wage war or surpress ethnic groups, but you don't have to "remember" by treating people with disrespect.
"Everyone knows that vi vi vi is the number of the beast" -- Richard Stallman