building from photos

[jim currie]

when building from photos , if you take the photo use a yard stick set up against the object painted white , red , white at the ft mark gives a known dimension for measuning of object in photo, or measure somthing (door window) and note it for referance, if photo is not one you took then look for standard dimensions like a brick or a cinder block a car / truck rim stop sign or any thing that has a common size to it.
jim

[THereSe]

thanks for the tip jim..

i'll always keep it in mind...

[P5se Camelback]

Jim ...

Your advice for using a photo from which to scratch-build is good advice, however, the dimensions on a yardstick can be difficult to read in a photo. That is why I recently offered The Measuring Stick as a neat homemade tool for use when taking photographs of record for the purpose of using them as an aid from which to build.

The suggestion of using some known dimension, such as those of a brick, to develop the dimensions of the prototype is also good advice.

[WT fan]

I had a little helper with a stick, this stick was in H0 just 1 cm!



And for my church at Salina I used Google. I measured the Grandt Line windows which were 22mm tall. In the printed picture the window was 36mm tall. This way I've got the size.
Wolfgang

[Gary S]

Either that guys is very short or those rails are very wide.

[WT fan]

Either that guys is very short or those rails are very wide.

Standard gauge, and my son was about seven years old.

Wolfgang

[Gary S]

Oh!!!!

Now I see it! I didn't look that close, I thought that was a railroad worker! No wonder he seemed so short!

[Mr Fixit]

Interestingly if you take Wolfgang's photo as an example we have present a variable yardstick and that is the rail gauge as it diminishes into the background.
So lets say for argument you wanted to know the size of those two garage doors on the white house to the left of the tracks in the centre of the photo?
How do you measure them? Well we know that the gauge is most probably standard gauge at 4' 8 1/2" or 1435mm, so then if you measure the track width when level with the garage doors you will have a known dimension to work from. We also know from personal experience that the doors in all probability must be able to have a car drive through so that will act as a checking measurement.
The all time classic example of this yardstick method occurred during WW2 when an RAF Spitfire on photo recon took a photo of a Wurzburg radar installation. Standing at the bottom of the radar unit was a German soldier looking up at the Spitfire as it zoomed past. Photo interpreters back in England were able to use the height of an average male [at that time] to then work out the approximate diameter of the radar dish to work out its operating frequency and so know where to begin searching the radio wave spectrum and begin developing countermeasures. A photo is truely worth a thousand words.

Mark