Using a Railway as a Massive Flatbed Scanner
By taking a camera, pointing it out the window of a train, and keeping track of how fast the train is moving, you can create very wide panoramic scans of the scenery.
It’s a little more complicated than that — all the details are here — but you’re essentially using the train (or ferry) as a massive flatbed scanner.
I knew from the start that I’d need to measure the speed somehow, but I was naïvely hoping that I wouldn’t need to measure it that well and could simply fudge it. This image, however, shows that even small variations of speed matter. This was my first glimpse into how much of a pain dealing with speed would turn out to be.
I love little hacky projects like these.
Comments 2
I worked with a guy who used one of these cameras to take photos of trains (and various other things). Super smart dude; huge amount of work involved in getting the equipment and processing to spit out usable photos.
Ooh, this is great! Reminds me of Adam Magyar's slit-scan photos.
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