Photographer Turns the Then & Now Trend on Its Head, Holds Up Photos of the ‘Future’
Always fascinated by the then and now series that make their way across the Web, photographer Samantha Decker wanted to give it a shot herself. The thing was, she didn’t want to do the exact same thing everyone else was doing.
That’s how she settled on a reality-altering series by the name of Now & Then: Seeing the Future from the Past.
Rather than taking the usual “hold an old photo up over the current scene” approach, Decker decided to use a bit of Photoshop trickery to turn the perspective on its head — she holds up a present-day shot agains a background scene from a time long past.
As to how she went about creating these images, we caught up with Decker and asked her to explain:
My hand is meant to be in the scene from the past, therefore I tinted or colored it for each photo to match the scene. Before creating the scenes, I photographed my hand against a white background (to make it easier to mask), and gathered public domain photos from WikiMedia Commons that were similar to photos I already had.
From there, she combined the photographs she captured from current scenes with the composited archival images. What she’s left with is a rather unique take on a genre of photography that we’ve featured many times before:
To see more Decker’s work, be sure to visit her website, give her page a ‘like’ on Facebook, or following her over on Flickr by clicking on the corresponding link.
Image credits: Images by Samantha Decker and used with permission. All ‘then’ photos are in the public domain unless otherwise stated.
