Shooting my F Panel – Getting the geometry right

From the start I had conceived my panel of images of people standing in the doorways of Victoria Line trains as being displayed in a way that resembled a train. For this to look right, all the images needed to be uniform in the sense that everything lined up – doors, widows and interiors – just as they would in real life if they were one train. In addition, I needed to shoot directly into the doorway area with the camera as central as possible.

My plan was to take the photos sitting on a platform seat where I would be out of the way with the camera alongside me on the seat, mounted on a Platypod to give a firm footing. This would be as good as having the camera on a tripod.

On an exploratory visit to the Victoria Line to try out various ideas and sort out the technicalities, I found out that at most stations there was only one seat on each platform that came close to providing a clear symmetrical view into the train doorways. Worse still, was that consecutive trains didn’t necessarily stop in exactly the same place; nearly but not exactly. I just had to put up with that. I made a survey of all the platforms on the Victoria Line so that I knew where to sit and didn’t waste time looking for a place that was opposite the doors.

It became apparent that besides the lateral variations in alignment there were subtle differences in vertical alignment too, caused by minor differences in the physical platform and seat arrangements from station to station. These had to be dealt with in post processing in Photoshop to get everything lined up exactly, using templates with guides to set the doorway openings, door windows, and key features of the interior to common datum lines. The Photoshop transform warp tool was used to make the vertical alignment adjustments. The end result was worth all the effort and I managed to achieve what I had set out to do.

This is the second post in the series on my F panel. You can read the first here. The third post in the series is about getting the colour right – read it here.

There is nothing like a good challenge!