This week I was in NYC hanging out with a close friend. I had the opportunity to visit the small town nearby where I spent 5 years of my childhood, so I recreated a few childhood photos.
Tools I used:
iPhone 13 mini camera
A friend to take the pics (thanks Truc!)
Context
Quite serendipitously, during my week to NY, a friend invited me to a pool party further along the same train line as the town I spend a good chunk of my childhood in. So I decided to leave a bit earlier and hop off to take a walk down memory lane with another friend. Unfortunately (for this particular adventure) we all shared a distinct lack of urgency and left Grand Central far later than planned, which meant we only had an hour to walk around the town, find my old school and house, and stage a few shots. Still, we managed to recreate 3 photos.
Process
Firstly I asked my dad to send me some old snaps from the archives. Many of these photos weren’t suitable or interesting for recreation: either they involved other friends or family who weren’t with me, the photos were set in the winter with lots of snow, or were closeups of me without much background context. I found a couple that had some notion of place to recreate.
We got to my old house and set about lining up positions and angles with the photos. There we discovered that photos taken with a larger SLR lens aren’t as easy or intuitive to recreate with a smartphone camera, particularly re the depth of field and zoom. Seemingly simple shots confused us because the relative size of background, subject, and foreground were maddeningly difficult to get right.
Here were our best efforts with limited time and equipment:
Learnings
A tripod would have been really useful. Matching the exact position and angle and pose from an existing photo takes way longer than I expected, and requires lots of micro-adjustments
Pretending to be a kid again is always fun
Next steps
Recreate a bunch more of my old photos, not necessarily just childhood ones
I have various incomplete projects of taking photos of myself in similar but different contexts, kind of like self portrait photo typologies (see Week 25 - Photo Typologies). It would be fun to expand that to photos taken over time, or over space