Hanover Hospital, shown in this 1940s picture, looks similar to the contemporary photograph below. If you check out the Evening Sun’s ‘Picturing History’ page or go to bottom of this post, you can slide between the old and the new. That ‘Picturing History’ feature, put together by journalist Christine Loman, is part of a series contrasting the old the new. Photographer Shane Dunlap offers background about photography to enrich the visit. You’ve now seen the old, continue reading for the new. (Also of interest: How Hanover’s Eichelberger School morphed into ‘The Eich’.)
Hanover Hospital today. Shane writes: ‘A majority of photography done prior to 1960 was using large-format film and a view camera. A view camera was one of the first cameras invented and can be brought to mind thinking of famous photographers like Ansel Adams, hiding under a black hood while looking through a bellowed camera. Even today, a view camera has the ability to control an image that the most sophisticated digital fixed-lens cameras can hardly emulate. When looking at old photographs of buildings it’s worth noting that the photographer at the time, if using a view camera, had options for controlling horizontal and vertical movements of both the lens plane and film plane independently of one another. Unlike most modern cameras where the lens plane and the film plane (sensor planes, these days) are in fixed positions.’
Interesting. For whatever gains photographic equipment has made in the digital world – and there are many – some parts of the old manual process can’t be beat.
And now, the old and the new:
Also of interest:
See an earlier part of Christine and Shane’s Picturing History series: Broadway in Hanover.
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