Not yer average panorama, but I still need to do it.

[Wombat]

I have a need to do a panorama, which rather than being radial, is a straight line.  By this, I mean I want to move parallel to the objects I am photographing, to build up a long image of a long object I can't get far enough away from to fit it all in.

Basically, its railway carriages and locos, here: http://www.sierraleonerailwaymuseum.com/

Bearing in mind the variable and generally poor light levels in this "museum" (i.e. an old railway shed), I think I'm going to be struggling, but I need to give it my best shot. 

Has anyone here ever stitched together photos in this manner, using Lightroom (6), and did they have problems with it?  I've done "normal" stitched panoramas in Lightroom, easy peasy.

I will be using a Sony A77 (thats APS-C format) with a Sigma 17-70 2.8 zoom, as I think my Sigma 10-20 will result in some horrendous distortion.  I'm not buying new lenses for that camera, as its getting replaced during the coming year (when Sony drop the prices a bit on the A7Rii).  i am requested by the standards I'm meant to be complying with, not to use any focal length of less than 35mm (in full frame terms) due to distortion issues, but Lightroom is pretty good at correcting distortion using the correct lens profile.

Pitfalls?   (yes, I will be using a tripod!)

I'm considering having a go at a similar scene in the UK, before I go off to Sierra Leone in late Feb.

[tom_e]

Stitching a sequence of photos like that is very different to a panorama - knowledge of the lens distortion is of limited help.  The problem is that as you move you change viewing angle on every object and set of objects relative to one another.  Think of the parallax effect, as the background moves relative to the foreground when you move sideways.  This will apply to near and far parts of the loco itself as well as the stuff behind it.

My suggestions?
* Try and get a featureless background.  Failing that, limited depth of field or lots of post-processing to kill the background.
* Get as far back as possible.
* Take lots of photos at a relatively short spacing between each one.
* Use a zoom as high as possible and still fit the full height in - you won't be able to use the parts of the photo at any significant lateral offset from the middle anyway, so no point in capturing much width in each shot.

I'd definitely experiment before going to Sierra Leone!  A line of parked cars or suchlike?  See what quality you can achieve.

[Zipperhead]

I've tried to create a panorama doing exactly that - moving along a line of something, with plenty of overlap and then stitching them together in lightroom.

And failed.

I think the problem is that the foreground and background position change from side to side relative to the subject that it gives up.

You might be able to do it by using gimp and working through the pictures pair by pair and setting the points to align manually, ignoring foreground and background. But definitely try it first.

I have recently done a lot of panoramas using 12mm (DX) and although the front to back perspective was stretched, side to side was pretty good.

[fuaran]

This is sometimes known as a "linear panorama" or a "mosaic". So maybe look up tips for those.

It can be stitched with Hugin, tutorial here.http://hugin.sourceforge.net/tutorials/Mosaic-mode/en.shtml

For taking the photos, maybe worth measuring it all out. ie use a tape measure or bit of string, to make sure you stay the same distance from the train, and same distance side to side (allowing for plenty of overlap). A tripod will help keep the angles the same.

[mike]

Sounds like a fascinating project!

Can you get your mitts on an f1.4 lens for the trip?  Getting the background out of focus would help the stitching.  Do you know how far back you can get from the train?  What focal length is the longest that'll let you get the full height of the beast in one frame?

Or what about a hackney-style collage which is deliberately dis-jointed?  example 4 on here, for eg. http://www.nls.k12.mn.us/gallery/david-hockney-photo-collage/

[Wombat]

Thanks for all the input on this!  I will be doing a trial run in the UK very soon (i.e. when it bloody stops raining) but need to find something similar in size to this rolling stock, as mainline UK stuff is much bigger.  actually I think the handiest thing of about the same size is a normal single decker bus, so I'll practice on the parked up buses at Hilsea depot, bet that'll get me some strange looks, and possibly snotty comments.

As for background in the railway shed, I'll try to pretend there isn't one, its not pretty, being just another row of rolling stock about 3 metres behind the row in question, and I'll be photographing that row next...  I will definitely be doing chalk lines on the floor, and aligning my tripod legs with the line to keep things as even as possible.

I have today received domestic authority approval to throw a huge amount of money at my photographic needs, partly because my other main challenge is photographing regency dancing, which needs a moderate wide angle of decent aperture, and a camera (preferably full frame) with excellent high ISO noise performance.  A Nikon D810 is good, but a Sony A7Rii is arguably better, and is much smaller, and has certain other plus points such as taking absolutely anybody's lenses with a Metabones or other adaptor, even doing autofocus using canon or Nikon lenses.

Its going to be a fun trip, I've heard today that the £109 visa application fee is being waived, because the Sierra Leone Govt folk seem to want me to go.  No pressure, or anything.  I just have to identify every railway artefact we find, that's all, and I am currently stumped as to who built two of the carriages, and no, there's no-one I can ask, as the usual experts are already on the team, and according to legend I am the person who know more about Sierra Leone rolling stock than anyone else.... (a very doubtful accolade indeed...) Hmmm.

I can see a Zeiss Loxia 35mm F2 coming into my life....

That said, if I can get reasonable results with what I've got on trials, I'll take the A77 to Sierra Leone, and not be too worried if it suffers a slight misfortune.

[Kim]

Hmm... Thinking alongside the box (as it were):  Line scan camera, mounted on some sort of dolly?

[David Martin]

Hmm... Thinking alongside the box (as it were):  Line scan camera, mounted on some sort of dolly?

That would be my thought. Set up a dolly line (tripod on a trolley ), run the camera along (portrait format) and grap a pic every half meter or so. Then splice together the center parts of them.

Another option if you can get enough difference in height is to take a load of photos from all angles and use Autocad 123D to reconstruct a 3D view of the lot.

[Kim]

Another option if you can get enough difference in height is to take a load of photos from all angles and use Autocad 123D to reconstruct a 3D view of the lot.

That sounds suspiciously like a legitimate application for a selfie-stick.

[fuaran]

Another option if you can get enough difference in height is to take a load of photos from all angles and use Autocad 123D to reconstruct a 3D view of the lot.

That sounds suspiciously like a legitimate application for a selfie-stick.

Or a quadcopter.

[Wombat]

I'm not buying, and learning to fly, a quadcopter, in that confined shed by the end of February...  (and of course travelling to SL with it.)

I can do one line of stuff using a travelling dolly, as the hand pump car is on one of the tracks, and David's idea of generating a 3D image is VERY tempting, as I wanted to take a 3D scanner, but the cost of ones that are any good, seems to be a trifle large.

Last night's regency dance event reminded me that a 35mm prime lens is NOT wide enough, and it would need to get used for that as well to justify buying one.  I really must stop looking at the Zeiss website...  The Batis 25mm F2, and 85mm 1.8 are calling to me....  (I'm sure the last time I looked, the 85 was about £1,500, but it now seems to be £900...)  Shame the intended camera body is £2.5k.

I suspect the final effort will be by marking a straight chalk line, and moving the tripod mounted camera along it a step at a time.  If I really cannot get enough in height-wise, then the idea is a dead-un.  it was to give a better impression of what is in the museum for website visitors, as well as helping a few modellers get a better image, and provide an "official record" for the museum.  If the "parallel-pano pic" idea does not work at all, then I will have to resort to just getting much better angled pics than we already have, on this visit.  I can certainly do the job with what I have, but it may be that I can "prove the concept" this time, and then return next year with better kit having learnt from the first time, and do a better job.  Whatever I achieve, it will drastically improve on what we've already got. 

I'm appalled that of the people that have visited the museum, the only ones who can even point a camera in the right direction and take a reasonable shake-free pic is Col Steve Davies, when he was there in the army, before he came back and was director of NRM, and Andrew Scott, who WAS director of NRM at the time.  Steve'll be with us this time too...

We shall see...

[David Martin]

Take (at least) two cameras and point them in slightly different directions and from different heights on the dolly? Then you can get away with closer to standard lenses. It would also be cheaper and give less distortion than a superwide.
This also has the benefit of redundancy if you have a limited budget. Losing[1] one large camera/lens would be disaster - losing one of two is an inconvenience.

[1] to mechanical failure etc.

[andrew_s]

If you are worried about the height, you could think about a shift lens, taking 2 or 3 shots at different vertical offsets for each dolly position

[Wombat]

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.

[mike]

sounds amazing - is there a gallery online? would love to see some!

[Jaded]

Sounds like there isn't a server big enough for the gallery 

[David Martin]

Shoot lots and tile. And it sounds like less than a few Tb of data so not too bad

Really looking forward to seeing the results.

[Wombat]

Still ploughing my way through it all, but I'm nearly there.

There will be some galleries posted in the next week.  There is one serously informal one up already (including things like the African dancers/drummers, and the pyython that diidn't want to perform in front of the crowd), but I don't have access to the URL on this work PC.

They're not exciting, but a treasure trove to railway "anoraks" like myself.

[Zipperhead]

There will be some galleries posted in the next week.  There is one serously informal one up already (including things like the African dancers/drummers, and the pyython that diidn't want to perform in front of the crowd), but I don't have access to the URL on this work PC.

Good grief, what is this place coming to, 3 hours and nobody's said it....

My python doesn't like perfoming in front of a crowd either.

[Kim]

I once wrote some Python that performed in front of a crowd...

[Wombat]

Bloody 'ell, Kim, that was brilliant!

Anyway, the informal album is here: https://goo.gl/photos/1P15KzMT813ptN6V6   but I still have some heavy processing to do on some of the damaged archive photos, which is proving hard going.

All of the railway stuff in the pictures is proper British, like (Either Beyer Peacock, Gorton, Manchester, Hunslet, Leeds, Hudswell Clarke, Leeds, Bristol Carriage and wagon works, Gloucester C&W, Metropolitan of sunny Birmingham, etc.)