Sometimes it's the simple questions that prove the most interesting.
I was relating the story of how a particular picture that I saw inspired me to go to Glacier National Park and hike the same trail. I had seen a picture, printed it out, and posted it in my cube for years thinking "I want to go right there". When I had the chance I did.
Fast forward a number of years, and I'm showing telling this story to a friend and she says "That's great, but EXACTLY where is the original picture taken from. Yours is not the same location". ERRRRR, crap. She was right. Time for some research.
Ok, This is the picture that inspired me. It's a picture taken from the Grinnell Glacier overlook by Phil Armitage. It's a bear of a hike, more or less a 1,000' vertical feet in 1 mile. If you want to experience it yourself put your treadmill on 12 percent and start, continue for 45 minutes. But damn, is the view at the end worth every minute.
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And this is the picture I took.
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So the quesiton is, Where was his picture taken from relative to mine?
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First to the internet to find some other pictures with differnt viewpoints.
Picture 4 is a really small thumnail, but it's enough to confirm it's the same location. Picture 5 is much better and is zoomed out a bit showing a lot more of the area around the shot. Picture 6, shows the progresion from the orginal to where we are now.
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And here is where I went down the wrong direction. The original picture really looks like it should have been taken to the right of my picture and from pictures 4 and 5 it really looks like it was taken from the area very close to where the mountain has a sharp peak. Nope. Totally an issue of forced perspective.
What finally got me back on the right track was to take picture 5, put it into photo and use the levels tool to brighten the show areas. Bingo. A large unique crack in the rock that can be used to find the location. Now, just to find that same crack in my photo.
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WTF? That can't be right. Can it?
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Why yes it can. Enter our old friend forced perspective again.
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The things I found most interesting about this were the strange forced perspective situations that led me in the wrong direction and the need to find similar pictures with just the smallest difference in perspective that allowed me to see that all important crack. I'll leave this with the original image and mine.
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