Photographs of landscapes don’t really enthuse me much. I’m generally much happier with scenery which contains a few wind turbines…I suspect that’s because, apart from being an elegant, quiet design, they also add some sense of scale (and distance). Even the most beautiful view means little to me without that.
Today’s invention therefore is a way to add this to even the most featureless of photographs.
Mountain walkers frequently carry GPS units which record in great detail the path taken on a digital map (as well as a check on the altitude, as indicated by the map’s contours). A walker could take his photographs (using a camera which similarly recorded position, compass direction and elevation/declination). Later, each of these shots could have the path taken superimposed on it (imagine the translucent digital image, correctly oriented, being looked through -at a CAD-like model of the terrain on which the route appears eg as a red line. Such a line could easily be projected onto the ‘screen’ of the image itself).
This would then allow injection of digital images of eg a person -scaled appropriately for different locations along the route. For added realism, it would even be possible to inject a synthetic shadow each time, knowing the time of day at which the image was taken.
