Tag Archives: turntable

How To Move Ships Around The Shipyard

The walk from our hotel in Victoria to a favorite breakfast spot took us alongside one of the local shipyards.  This yard had plenty of decent sized vessels out of the water and being worked on.  I was quite taken by their method of moving the boats around.  They have a lift area in the water and then the ships get put on supports on rails.  There is a turntable in the yard which allows each vessel to be moved to a different part of the yard.  I had seen a hint of this on Google Maps before we went so was interested to check it out when we walked by.

Sacramento Roundhouse

One end of the railroad museum in Sacramento is a roundhouse. It is accessible still from the line outside and I was there for a modern locomotive that was being unveiled. Access comes via a turntable which sits right next to the path along the river. I figured I would put together a panorama of the scene. However, I only had my phone (albeit able to shoot raw). I had never tried shooting a pano sequence with it before having only used its internal pano function.

I wasn’t controlling the exposure (although there is a manual function in the app I use) but I had noticed that the Lightroom pano function seemed quite adept at dealing with small exposure variation. I took the sequence and there was not a big difference across them. When I got home, I added them to Lightroom and had a go at the stitching function. It worked better than I had expected. Some small distortions were there but it actually was rather good. I had not been happy about the reduced size of the pano function of the phone so this has provided a better option to use in the future.