I was recently contacted by David Wilson of the Oamaru Ordinary Cycle Club to recreate a photograph from the 19tyh century.
For those readers unfamiliar with Ordinary Cycles, another name for them is “penny farthing”. I’ve been a member of the club for some years, but ride a safety bicycle on club events due to my hope of reaching old age.
The Victorian Heritage Celebrations here in Oamaru asked for recreations of Victorian photographs. You can read about the details here.
This is the original:
You can see the Christchurch to Dunedin railway behind the riders. That was completed in 1878.
Penny farthings were popular in the 1870s to 1880s, and began to fall out of use after the production of safety cycles began around 1885. They were no longer produced after 1893.
So that gives a date for the photograph of roughly 1879 to 1888.
David organised the riders to assemble at 8am on a Saturday morning. We hoped that the traffic would not be a problem at that time. He even managed a dog to take part.
I had previously worked out the position of the original camera and stood as close as I could to that spot given the changes that had taken place in the street over the last 130 years.
Photographic plates in the 1880s couldn’t manage the dynamic range of modern cameras. So in order for the subjects to be correctly exposed, the sky was often overexposed to white, as seen in the original.
I converted the colour file to B&W and adjusted the tones to match the original and reduced the sky to near white. There was a little cloning to remove some obvious distractions such as marks on the road, which normally would have been cleaned up earlier in the day if there were time. I felt the signs and cars should not be removed because that is how the street looks “now’, and that may be of interest in fifty years’ time.
And here is the result:
Full credit to the riders from the OOCC who were patient while Sonja told them to “move 10 centimetres to the left” or “lean to the right”.
Edit: I was humbled to to be told that the picture was awarded the top prize in the 2018 Oamaru Victorian Heritage Celebrations Historic Photo Recreation Competition