Pat Deem has discovered that it only takes some basic electronics, an Internet connection and a bit of creative inspiration to become a sensation on the World Wide Web.

He has so far posted three videos on YouTube in a series he calls “Hamilton Now and Then,” in which he juxtaposes photos he’s gathered from the Lane Library’s Cummins Collection of photographs with shots that he has taken himself.

He admits to being a little taken aback by the interest his hobby has been generating.

A carpenter by trade and a drummer in the Phoenix Band Cincinnati, Deem said this recent hobby stems from his interest in genealogy. His family has been in Hamilton for several generations.

“I started taking pictures about 15 years ago, finding old relatives’ gravestones,” he said. “Then I started looking at all the old photographs on the Lane Library web site and was amazed at all the old buildings I recognized.

“I started going out and taking picture of them,” he said. “At first, I would put them side-by-side because I thought the contrast was very interesting.”

He bought a basic video editing package so he could create videos of the endeavor, and realized that he could create a more dramatic impact by overlaying the old photos over the new ones, or vice-versa, and doing a fade-in.

And he’s done it without a lot of high-tech equipment. The first installment was used shooting a simple Samsung point-and-shoot camera. The next two using a slightly more sophisticated Sony DSC-H90 he received as a Christmas gift.

“Certainly not even close to being a pro camera, but it is a huge improvement over the Samsung,” he said. “Some day I may get a real camera.”

“I realized that perspective is everything,” he said. “If you have the right perspective, if you take the photo from the right spot, they’ll line up perfectly.”

“It’s interesting because the buildings remain exactly the same, at least the same size, but everything around them has changed,” he said. “It’s almost like looking at an ancient civilization. No one’s ever heard of these people anymore.”

“We go through our life surrounded by these remnants but we hardly give them any thought,” he said.

He posted his first four-minute video just before Christmas and immediately started getting hits and comments. He revised that original video and re-posted it, and it now has more than 5,000 views. There are now three installments on his YouTube page — www.youtube.com/dingbat — and he said he has plenty more to work on.

What’s not posted, however, is some of his background research. He found that a simple Google search of some of the names in the photos will reveal interesting history.

“It’s like a treasure hunt, or solving a mystery,” he said.

The comments under his videos have also become something of a walk down memory lane as people reminisce about old times and old places.

“You just took me ‘home’ and back in time,” wrote Cherry Moore. “I grew up on Canal Road north of town. Our garden was where the Erie Canal had once been. I’m so grateful that Hamilton has valued so many of it old buildings.”

“Thank you for doing this!” Tonia Graves posted. “I was born and raised in Hamilton. I love seeing all the old photos of times gone by. It is sad to know that many of those times and the culture has faded away. I think that current generations could take lessons from past generations. Simpler times I believe were better times.”

Coleen Pence posted: “I work/teach downtown Hamilton and I’ve often wondered why someone didn’t do this sooner. There are times that I purposefully drive through one of the neighborhoods on my way home and I think of the stories of the boarded up groceries, taverns, churches. Keep doing this. Hamilton is rich ground for photo essays.”

With the anniversary of the 1913 flood coming up, Deem said he’d like to do some more work to document the changes that have taken place since then, but that it’s difficult to do because so many of the iconic photos from that disaster were taking from the second and third story of buildings that don’t exist anymore, making it impossible to get the exact perspective.

“Getting it right has more of an emotional impact than just showing that’s what it was and this is what it is,” he said.

In addition to the Cummins photos, he said he’s mined his own family collection, but has discovered that many of the buildings don’t exist anymore.