{"id":1431,"date":"2011-11-15T00:59:46","date_gmt":"2011-11-15T04:59:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/?p=1431"},"modified":"2011-11-16T15:53:31","modified_gmt":"2011-11-16T19:53:31","slug":"gary-blakeley-zeitag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/gary-blakeley-zeitag\/","title":{"rendered":"Gary Blakeley: Zeitag"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Gary Blakeley by Robert Lansdale<\/p><\/div>\n

Toronto photographer\u00a0Gary Blakeley<\/a>\u00a0has spent thirty years as a graphic designer for arts, academic, and business communications. He has lengthy expertise in print production, computer graphics, and information technology. Running through his photography are themes of architecture, travel,\u00a0and militaria.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Zeitag app is currently a hot topic and we were honoured to have the man\u00a0responsible as our guest speaker. Gary Blakeley is a member of the society as well as\u00a0a graphic designer. He described an application for the iPhone and iPad that shows\u00a0views of the city intersection you are located at. The app is called Zeitag.\u00a0Zeit is German for time and tag is for tagging or locating. He worked with Valentina\u00a0Vogman and Sveta Fedarava to source the images.
\n\"Zeitag<\/a>He started by showing images with people and asked the audience where and when\u00a0they were taken. They could figure out the place for one, and the time for the other.\u00a0This is what Zeitag does. It uses the location you are in and then brings up archival\u00a0pictures with date information so you can see what the area used to looked like.<\/p>\n

The idea came to him in 2008, when he took his family to New York City and showed\u00a0them where the World Trade Centre had been. But it was a construction site and\u00a0there was no easy way to show them what used to stand there. He needed a\u00a0photographic time machine to be able to stand\u00a0at the site and view what it once\u00a0looked like.<\/p>\n

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Abbott's NYC: under the elevated, bus station, the radio shops, people crossing the street.
Click image to see slide show<\/p><\/div>\n

He used New York to show the building of the World Trade Centre as well as the\u00a0completed structures. Then, looking through archives he found pictures of what was\u00a0there before as far back as the 1930s or 40s. He used the scanned images from the\u00a0Bernice Abbott collection of the New York Public Library and over 500 photographs,\u00a0from various parts of the city\u00a0have been added to the Zeitag NY database so far.<\/p>\n

Since Gary is based in Toronto, however, it was the first city he made the app for,\u00a0using the extensive photo archive of the City of Toronto of which 50,000 have been\u00a0scanned at the optimum resolution to be viewed on an iPad. Some images were also\u00a0obtained from Heritage Mississauga, Library and Archives Canada, as well as the\u00a0National Film Board.<\/p>\n

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Toronto: the armoury on University, old Fort York, building the Royal York, Ingls helps the war effort.
Click image to see slide show<\/p><\/div>\n

People have asked whether the photographs can be married to Google Street View but\u00a0Gary wants people to get out and\u00a0see for themselves what is there now as well as\u00a0what came before. Over five hundred photographs have been tagged of Toronto to\u00a0date. Zeitag shows various pictures of buildings, some of which do not exist anymore.\u00a0Locations include Hanlan\u2019s Point, the Royal York Hotel, The Armory, Fort York and the\u00a0Inglis factory. Sometimes what is there now is just a few trees or a nondescript\u00a0building.<\/p>\n

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Hanlan's Point: the whip ride, map of Hanlan's, the car ride.
Click image to see slide show<\/p><\/div>\n

When you open the app you get a Google map view of the city with icons showing\u00a0that images of the selected intersection are available. Where there is more than one\u00a0image, they are displayed in chronological order. Zeitag uses the built-in GPS function\u00a0in the Apple device to pinpoint where you are. Also the date when the picture was\u00a0taken is shown. Original caption, photographer, copyright, reference number and\u00a0coordinates, are entered whenever possible.<\/p>\n

Trying to find where the images were taken can be a puzzle in itself. At well-known\u00a0intersections, there can be many photographs from different times in the 20th and\u00a021st centuries.<\/p>\n

Gary has also been working on Detroit and New York apps, which will be available\u00a0before the end of this year. He is also developing an Android version.\u00a0The Zeitag app\u00a0contains no information and pulls everything in from a website so updates are easy.\u00a0The Zeitag apps are free (for now) and will expand as time permits. The hardest part\u00a0is trying to find photos which have been already scanned and also are in the public\u00a0domain.<\/p>\n

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Brandenburg Gate: c1910, c1932, and post WW2 from East Germany.
Click image to see slide show<\/p><\/div>\n

It was an interesting talk and a new way to view old photographs.<\/p>\n

Mark Singer
\n\"\"<\/a>From left: Scott Rickard, Gary Blakeley, Valentina\u00a0Vogman, Sveta Fedarava, Clint. Click for a larger view. <\/p>\n

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This page was designed in WordPress on an iMac running OS X 10.7 (Lion). Clint, Rick and the team were taken by Bob Carter after the talk. All other images were taken by Bob directly from the projection screen with a Sony NEX-5 digital still camera and subsequently adjusted in Adobe Lightroom V3.3 and Photoshop CS 5. Presentation images are \u00a92011 by Gary Blakeley and may used only with his permission. Contents and all other images are \u00a92011 by the Photographic Historical Society of Canada and may be used freely provided the source is clearly indicated. Copies of photographs displayed during this presentation may not be used without the copyright holder’s permission. Contact PHSC at info@phsc.ca<\/a> if you would like more information on the items discussed in this post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Toronto photographer\u00a0Gary Blakeley\u00a0has spent thirty years as a graphic designer for arts, academic, and business communications. He has lengthy expertise in print production, computer graphics, and information technology. Running through his photography are themes of architecture, travel,\u00a0and militaria. The Zeitag … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,3],"tags":[83,67,30,82],"class_list":["post-1431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-people","category-program","tag-app","tag-blakeley","tag-images","tag-zeitag"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1431"}],"version-history":[{"count":52,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1431\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1497,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1431\/revisions\/1497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}