Transsiberian Slitscan Test

Taken over the course of 3 weeks, travelling from St Petersburg to Hong Kong via Ulan Bataar and Beijing.

Between March and April, 2015, my partner and I travelled over 10,000km. We covered one quarter of the way around the planet, the vast majority by train. Using a small, second hand digital camera and a sticky camera mount, I recorded the majority of the train journeys.

What you see is over 200GB of footage, shrunk into a single image using a technique known as slitscan. Every frame, I take the middle column of pixels and concatenate it to the image. Each vertical column of pixels represents 1/30th of a second. This adds up into a huge strip, which is then cut and pasted into a more pleasing rectangle.

To navigate, double click to zoom in. Hold your mouse button down and drag the cursor to move around the image. You can also use the controls on the left.

The software used in creating this image included custom C++ code with libpng and libtiff (with bigtiff support). PanoJS for the final viewer, MATLAB for processing the video into single images, Python to generate statistics on these images and imgcnv to build a PanoJS compatible pyramid.