Well, I've been, and... there was no way I was ever going to achieve what I set out to do. There is just not enough distance to get away from the damn things, to even fit the height in, with the camera in portrait format, using an approx 26mm lens (35mm equivalent, actually a 17-70 zoom). Ah well, so I contented myself with getting the best possible record shots (they ain't exciting, but they are useful) with the camera on a tripod, at the angles I could manage. there are one or two artifacts there that I could get a decent view of side on, (luckily that includes my next modelling project, a great monster of a Hudswell Clarke diesel), but as for the dirty great Beyer Garratt, at 64 ft long, there was no way thats ever going to fit in one frame, apart from at a very odd angle.
The lighting conditions were awful, with very harsh light blasting in throgh the side windows, and near blackness on the other side. Extensive use of exposure compensation weas made, and also in Lightroom, both dropping the highlights and pulling up the shadows had to be done on quite a few. Not ideal, but needs must.
I'm glad I didn't take the A7Rii and the 25mm Batis (yes, I bought them both), the A77 required extensive vacuum cleaning, and wiping over with an antibacterial wipe several times before I wanted to touch it again in the UK, and I honestly don't think I could have achieved much more with them anyway.
The British Library who run part of the project wanted uncompressed RAWs, converted to TIFF, so when I sent them a few test shots from compressed RAW saved as TIFF, they threw their hands up in horror, saying they didn't have storage for such huge files, and could I reduce them to 8 bit...
Just as well I didn't give them the uncompressed 14 bit RAWs from the A7Rii, which saved as 16bit TIFF come out at about 240 MB each. So I'm storing them as RAWs and uncompressed 16 bit TIFFs, and will need to buy another portable hard disk to hand them over, as it is.
Including the "street shots", fired through the cracked open windows of one of the various battered 4x4s we used as transport, I came back with 3150 photo and video files. I think the only videos were of the SL dance troupe dancing and playing some serious drum stuff, and one video "walk round" of the museum, which was not brilliant.
Sierra Leone? lovely, wonderful open people, but the country, well it has a few issues, like no useful infrastructure, and is a world of dust and dirt. Would I go back? Well, they want me to, and I'm not good at resisting.