Holloway Goods - Production of a Photographic Backscene
Entry posted by Steam_Julie
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Sitting, as one does, when waiting for a train at Birmingham New Street. I had nothing to read, so like many others I resorted to playing with my phone. I selected the camera, and was about to take some train pictures, when I spotted the Panorama option.
I played around with the option, with little success. But I then remembered that you can search for phone manuals online, at first with little success, because the first 2 I found were badly written. I eventually found a well written PDF. One section of which is reproduced below.
My phone is a basic Android Pixie phone, so my assumption is that these type of features are available on other smart phones. So why is this useful in railway modelling I hear you ask. The answer is in the production of photographic backscenes. Traditionally you take the pictures and then stitch them together at home using a computer. But there are pitfalls, if you make a mistake when taking the photographs, you may require to retake them. This is a problem when the location is hundreds of miles away from home.
The advantage of using a smart phone is the images are stitched together, in the phone, then and there. You can check they work, before you leave the photo location. They are also rendered into a single graphic file. By selected the SD card as your preferred storage location, a large file can easily be handled. You can also check the image in detail, by magnifying it when looking at it.
You need to practice before taking images for your project. I found that after about six practice panorama shots, I was getting reasonable results. An example of a panorama shot is shown
below.
I had to reduce the picture size to very significantly to enable it to be loaded onto RMWeb.
I took the shots, by rotating the camera through an angle. By choosing the photographic locations carefully, I think the results were excellent. You could take the panorama in a strait line using a bicycle saddle, on a smooth surface as a substitute track and dolly. If a single panorama shot is not long enough, you can stitch two shots together or stitch parts of a single shot on either end of a single panorama. You can always reverse a shot, within a graphics package to aid the stitching process.
You might have problems if something moves quickly whilst you are taking the panorama. When I was playing around on the concourse at New Street, I took a panorama and a lady in the left middle had three eyes, two mouths and noses! This was because she moved rapidly whilst the shots were being taken.
Because I took the original photographs at the highest resolution of the camera on the phone, I was able to enlarge the panorama by a factor of over 5 times and the image was still good enough for a backscene!
Julie
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