The Ithaca Commons, 1901 and 2009 March 2009 Ithaca, NY, 1901, taken from Shorpy.com. Click the photo to see the original. Ithaca, NY, 2009. Three Epson R-D1 pics, with CV 15/4 Heliar, stitched together in Photoshop. A friend of mine sent me a link to the above photo and challenged me to find the spot and take a contemporary photo of my own. Finding the spot was no trouble--it's State Street, and aside from the fact that the actual street has now been replaced with a hippie-friendly pedestrian mall, The Commons, it's still very similar. You can see in the distance of both photos (the old one, more so) the hill that Cornell University stands on. As it happens, I'm actually standing a little too far back--that tall building on the left in my photo is NOT the tall building on the left in the old one--the OLD tall building is half-hidden behind the tree in my picture, and MY tall building earned its extra height sometime after 1901. In any event, trying to duplicate this picture made me realize what an achievement the original is. I could tell I'd need a wide lens, so I grabbed my widest, the Voigtlander 15mm Heliar. As soon as I got there I realized that it was inadequate to the task. The original photographer was clearly using a large-format camera, which could likely be manipulated for perspective, and was probably standing on a ladder or platform. To get on 35mm what he got, I would have to have been using something like a 10mm tilt-shift lens. Which of course doesn't exist. So I took a bunch of photos, stitched them together in PS, and adjusted perspective via software. My photo, for all the sophistication of the technology I was using, is hugely inferior. Check out the full size scan on Shorpy--it's incredibly sharp and detailed. Look at the window washers! Amazing. Corner sharpness was obviously an issue in 1901, too, but I challenge you to take a picture like this with, say, a Sigma 10-20mm zoom on your SLR. c2009 by J. Robert Lennon.