Two people have made a 4 minute "travelogue" of their 7,500 mile train trip from Beijing to Moscow using the video capability of one of the DSLRs. A large part of this journey is on the Trans Siberian Railroad of course.
Few rail lines can compete historically
with the Trans Siberian Railroad. (1) It was built starting in
1891 and started from both ends to meet in the middle. Started by
the Czars and completed just before the Bolshevik Revolution, the
railroad connects Petrograd (St. Petersburg, Leningrad) and
Vladisvostok, the longest railroad in existence. Of course, St Petersburg was the capital of Imperial Russia at the time and Vladivostok was their relatively ice free port on the Pacific Ocean.
You can start to see the diorama effect / illusion in this picture
The Trans Siberian Railroad is famous
for opening up Siberia, for the role it played in the Russian
Revolution and the Civil War, in World War 1 and World War 2. If you saw the movie Reds (1981) with Warren Beatty, it features prominently in that. When
Moscow nearly fell to the Germans in the winter of 1941, it was the
secret transfer of the armies of Siberia to Moscow in a triumph of
logistics that stopped the Germans and threw them back in one of the
great battles of history.
For those who are considering a trip on the Trans Siberian Railroad, here is a humorous link in something called "Wikitravel":
http://wikitravel.org/en/Trans-Siberian_Railway
With John Reed on the Trans Siberian Railroad
For those who are considering a trip on the Trans Siberian Railroad, here is a humorous link in something called "Wikitravel":
http://wikitravel.org/en/Trans-Siberian_Railway
A friend of mine who has been on this train says that by the end of trip you realize that train travel is not all that romantic if they do not clean out the latrine cars often enough.
At Chita, one can turn south and
connect to a train that goes to Beijing.
Its 4 minutes long, its very interesting, and the music is great.
But what I find very interesting is that I keep seeing the so-called diorama illusion when I watch it. The diorama illusion is the illusion that something that is life size when photographed a certain way looks as though it is a model. The classic examples of these were Viewmaster photographs of something small. It has to do with a shallow depth of field.
Here is a Wikipedia page on the topic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniature_faking
In general the digital cameras have a more shallow depth of field because they are using lenses that have smaller focal lengths. Why it is we associate the shallow depth of field with the illusion of a model I do not know.
An article about the film (use Google
Chrome and it will translate it for you):
Wikipedia on the Trans Siberian Railway
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Notes:
1. Perhaps one of the very few that might compete with the Trans Siberian is the legendary Berlin -Baghdad Railway which played a role in WW1 and
is no longer operational.
