Fun with photostitch
When I was waiting for the southbound Coast Starlight to come by this afternoon, I watched a parade of Yellow Menace MOW equipment roll off the Oswego branch and north towards Brooklyn Yard. Most of the equipment was short enough to be able to fit into the frame even with my 55mm lens, but this four-car (plus the flatbed truck locomotive) ballast cleaning unit was just too big to fit, at least without some software support. So I took for pictures and stitched them together with autostitch (via the open source ®©™ Hugin program, which has a traditionally incomprehensible open source interface, but which has the decided advantages of (a) my not needing to build up a Windows box to run it or (b) pay money for a single-machine license to run it.)
The Pentax was running low on film (I’d already wedged 200 exposures onto the rated-for-160 exposure flash card) so I didn’t wave the camera around to get photos of the upper right and lower left of the frame. Maybe I’ll go back tomorrow and get those missing pictures and fill in the remaining parts of the image (yes, it’s supposed to be sunny tomorrow – this will merely be an additional challenge for autostitch to work with.)
If you look closely, you can see the places where autostitch had its tiny brain explode due to the movement of the train between photos.