I have long expressed an interest in the architectural, social and geographical history of each area in which I have lived or visited. For instance, during a five-year stretch in the 1980s, I produced a popular local newspaper column entitled "The Days That Used To Be," featuring side by side, before-and-after photographs of street scenes and landmark structures in and around my hometown in the Northeastern United States.
  The lengthy process of creating these unique blended images of Nashville landmarks began with researching and copying hundreds of archive photographs using traditional photographic means. Next, I scouted out each location where the turn-of-the-century photographer stood to make his original picture and then proceeded to shoot a contemporary color image of the same scene. Great care (and some personal risk!) was taken to match the original perspective as closely as possible.
  The "Days" newspaper feature was produced using strictly traditional photographic means. But while living in Nashville, I began to experiment with incorporating the use of computer imaging technology in this work with historical scenes. First, the copy negatives of the archive photos and new color reshoot negatives were scanned at high resolution and transferred onto CD-ROM. I was then able to manipulate the digitized images with Deneba's Canvas 6 software on a PowerMac 7300/180. With the use of Canvas' high-end manipulation features--especially the new "Sprite Layers"--the past was made to blend perfectly with the present, resulting in these haunting and thought-provoking images.

Mike Bedford
http://www.geocities.com/paris/6070
mbedford@fullerton.edu