Quote Originally Posted by Vaughn View Post
It ends up mattering a great deal to me. I contact only, no cropping, so one reason to retake it in a larger format is to have a bigger print of a scene and its light. Since I often include the film's rebate as part of the image, my personal working assumptions are much different than yours. Moving from a 4x5 to an 8x10 when 'retaking' an image requires a longer lens in order to maintain similar perspective (spacial relationship between near and far) and framing (edges and corners that define the center) of the original image.

But rarely can I improve upon the original seeing. It is difficult enough to be in the same place in the same part of the season, at the right time of day with the same wind and light conditions. So I tend to treat each use of a different format from the same spot as a different image. The closer the retake is to the original, the more I am usually dissatisfied with it. After two or four decades, one would hope I have learned a thing or two about a thing or two, and see some improvement or hint of maturity in my images.

Photographing along Prairie Creek for the last 40 years has been long enough to appreciate the many changes it has gone through in such a short time. A fallen giant and an opening to the sky created...the trunk of the fallen slowly becoming an elevated forest of berries and conifers. A scrawny 100 year old redwood in direct sunlight for the first time starts to stretch upwards. A bench of gravel left by the floods of Dec. 1964 slowly fills in with ferns, grasses, berries, then alders. The 250 year old maples standing proudly on the back of this bench against the backdrop of redwoods, have been collapsing one by one as they near their three century age limit. Each one was a vertical forest of lichen, moss and ferns, from the bottom of the trunk to the end of each branch, and weighing more than its leaves. Young maples are standing near-by.

That is the sort of thing I am trying to say using the light falling through centuries of redwoods.
I figured format would matter a lot or you, as you contact print. My reply was meant to be more generic. As for a retake being close to the original, I have noticed that many people find the similarity in old versus new uninteresting; they want to see change.

Focal length determines field of view, but does not affect perspective; whatever is common to both images will have the same spatial or geometric relationship, or perspective. But I think you know this too, even though you say otherwise above.

Many years ago I visited Prairie Creek, a beautiful and maybe challenging place to do repeat photography due to few stable landmarks visible through the forest. The small-scale changes you mention would be interesting.

The usual approach for repeat photography for scientific purposes is very monkey-see monkey-do, and there is no real incentive for "improvement", because this would confound interpretations. I did not think there would be much interest in it on LFPF because it is is so un-artistic.

I really appreciate the various perspectives on this topic, so thank you.