Here’s a new series of eerie World War II ghost photos by Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov, made to celebrate last week’s Europe V-day. Like previous ones, this gallery of photos is both disturbing and fascinating at the same time.
The shots are from Berlin, Prague and Vienna, and show the Red Army taking over those cities. The young soldiers and their tanks mix with tourists and modern cars. The gritty German architecture, having suffered thousands of bullets and bombs, merges with the modern and restored buildings, most of which stand as if none of that horror ever happened. When you walk through Berlin today you can still see signs of the street fighting, but I would love to have an augmented reality application that merged old photographs into live video of Berlin, in real time.
His technique seems simple, but it requires quite a bit of planning and expertise. Sergey matches the optics of the original WW2 photograph and the exact same position of the camera. He then takes a photo in our world and uses Photoshop to merge some part of the old images into the new. The results are fascinating – at least for me and any other WWII freak. [Livejournal]