2009 to 1890 south newcastle beach -with hardly any development

[Flatpete]

Hi Rob, excellent work... i'm doing a similar study for Morecambe Bay... I have collected and am currently setting up a website for collating old postcards and hopefully getting the community of the Heysham area to participate with submitting their own photographs for analysis. I have gained a good collection for a pilot basis and im interested in the techniques that you used for photo alignment... what camera you decided to use to emulate the camera that took the original still and such, Pete

[robertsirasch]

hi Pete, thanks for the comment. The best results i'm getting is to match the picture to the viewing screen on a Olympus SP-570uz. I am setting the screen to show the chequerboard pattern and comparing when i snap the pix to a print of the scene with a chequerboard pattern printed on it. Then by aligning distant objects. notches between objects etc to something near to get the correct line of sight. Distance along the line of site is a bit of a guess but by then using the zoom

[robertsirasch]

to get the right features in the right sectors near the lines they are supposed to be -it been a bit of trial and error with a patient sometimes exasperating learning curve along the way but for visual purposes as long as the major obvious features nearly line up its ok - comparing to grid at the time of taking the picture does that. I wish i could get a way of displaying what is on the viewer on a notebook screen at the time then a transparency overlay could get it perfect.

[robertsirasch]

there is the issue with the old cameras where they could tilt the photographic plate as well.. I have found that you can get the close objects perfect, the intermediate objects perfect or the far objects perfect. But rarely(if at all) all three at once. Then i have thought of splitting the image into the three zones making each perfect then recombining with some tinkering . Its maybe not worth it? Regards rob ps let me know the url of your website