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Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner

philo.gay

61–70 of 81 posts

Re: Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner

#61

This project is more deeply technical but one thing I find fun is to take a video from a moving train and create a video stereogram by having one eye lagging in time/distance behind the other eye, letting you create very long baseline stereograms. It's fun to be able to see the 3d effects on passing bridges, etc., and for large baselines on long straight stretches you can see the 3d structure of clouds in a fascinati…

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Re: Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner

#63
post #53

As someone who also did some line scan photography, I also ran into a lot of similar challenges! > Displaying and sharing the pictures I've taken has been a pain throughout the project. Most software on my computer doesn't like how big they are, and the most reliable tool I've found for viewing them has been GNU IMP, which feels a bit overkill. I vibe-coded my own image viewer, sriv, to address this: https://github.c…

The final quality of your photos is really impressive and your blog post was a good read on image processing.

Re: Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner

#65
post #58
post #6

Ward Cunningham and I did something similar back in 2008. We were both at a startup in Portland and our office was along the railroad tracks east of the Willamette. We were up on the 4th or 5th floor right above a lot of train traffic including Amtrak. I brought in some extra Mac gear I had including one of the early iSight cameras which back then was an external device you stuck on the top of your display and connec…

> It was a fun little project; the speed of the trains affected the horizontal compression of the images. A few years ago I took a photo out the window of a Shinkansen going 150 mph and was amused that everything in the foreground tilted significantly to the left because of this effect. This is about as close as I'll get to seeing what it's like to get sucked into a black hole.

That sounds more like rolling shutter effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_shutter

Re: Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner

#66
post #18

I've posted this here before but I have been creating animations using a similar process with a regular camera and manually splicing the frames together. [1,2,3] The effect is quite interesting in how it forces focus on the subject reducing the background into an abstract pattern. Each 'line' is around 15px wide. I think I went through exactly the same thought process as the author, funny how ideas can come up indepe…

These are so adorable!

Re: Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner

#67
post #53

As someone who also did some line scan photography, I also ran into a lot of similar challenges! > Displaying and sharing the pictures I've taken has been a pain throughout the project. Most software on my computer doesn't like how big they are, and the most reliable tool I've found for viewing them has been GNU IMP, which feels a bit overkill. I vibe-coded my own image viewer, sriv, to address this: https://github.c…

very impressed by the images you got, zero choppiness
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