This is a regular series of blogs about photographs of the same place taken years apart. I quite like those Then and Now comparison photographs that you see in books or on the Twitter or Facebook. The first of the posts in this series was of a council building in Manchester.
I always thought I should give then and now photographs a go. However what I have started to notice is that I have been doing Then and Now photographs unintentionally over the years and have been taking photographs of the same thing or place from the same view or perspective years apart. Now this has come to my attention I have started to intentionally take photographs of the same place.
I took this photograph at Minehead Station on the West Somerset Railway on the 4th September 2004 using a Sony Cybershot digital camera.
It is one of my all time favourite photographs of a steam engine. I even printed it out once at A2 size.
Visiting the West Somerset Railway nearly twenty years later in September 2023 I decided I would try and take the same shot again. However looking through my photographs on Twitter (no GPS EXIF data on these older photographs) I found I had taken a very similar photograph on May 27th 2013 using a Canon EOS 400D.
Here is the photograph from September 2023 that I took with an iPhone 13.
On a recent visit to Minehead I popped into the station at Minehead to replicate the same shot, this time with an iPhone 13.
This time, there was a carriage in the way…. The trains weren’t running and the station was being used to store the rolling stock.