Before & After

When attempting to document how a certain room or other object changes over time scales of many years, I believe the best way to do it is to produce before-and-after photos with the camera in the same location, and pointed in the same direction in each photo. Ideally, any other day-to-day variables should be identical as well, such as daylight or night-time, internal lights on or off, camera flash on or off, etc. The resultant photos should be carefully rotated, cropped, and resized so any unchanged features can be overlaid for accurate spacial reference when comparing one photo to another.

This webpage shows collections of these before-and-after photos that I made, with each set presented as an animated GIF.

University Electrical Engineering Lab Rooms

From 2005 to 2016, I worked at a university as the Electrical Lab Supervisor. For many decades, all of the EE labs were spread throughout the main academic building, but in 2014, a new engineering lab building was completed and I had to move vast quantities of parts, equipment, and furniture to the new building. Before the big move, I sought to document the conditions and contents of the lab rooms, and how they had changed over the years. The following images demonstrate how much had changed after 9 years. Only 6 lab rooms are shown here, comparing 2014 to 2005 or earlier. There were a few more lab rooms that I did not have any initial 2005 photos to start with. I describe each and every lab room in detail, as they appeared in 2014, in my Lab Tour video playlist on YouTube.

(1) Control, Automation, and Robotics Lab:

(2) Equipment Storage Room:

(3) Self-Service Electronic Parts Room:

(4) Electrical Lab Supervisor Office and Primary Equipment Room:

(5) EE Department Machine Shop:

(6) Senior Design Project Lab:

One of the faculty happened to have two black-and-white photos of the Senior Design Project Lab from 1987, which at that time, was the EE Computer Lab, sporting ten IBM PCs. I decided to use those photos for another before-and-after perspective, spanning 27 years:

This page last updated 2017-07-29.