Where is the camera?

Extract

Have you ever looked at a scenic photograph and wondered where it was taken from? The problem of calculating the location of the camera turns out to have a rather elegant solution. In the first place we want to make as few assumptions as possible about the optical systems used to produce the photograph. In particular, we will not, in general, know the focal length of the camera lens (or that of the enlarger). Neither will we know the precise direction in which the camera was pointing: the photograph we are looking at may be an enlargement of just a portion of the original photograph, so the centre of the photograph may not correspond to the centre of the optical system of the camera. However, we have to assume that there is no distortion, as is often evident on photographs of interiors or buildings taken with a wide angle lens. Fortunately, scenic photography usually involves bright light conditions with the camera stopped down to a small aperture so that it is a good approximation to an ideal “pin-hole” camera.