California State Railroad Museum

From Wikipedia...

The California State Railroad Museum in Old Sacramento is a tribute to the role of the "iron horse" in connecting California to the rest of the nation. The museum features 21 restored locomotives and railroad cars, some dating back to 1862.

This photo is of a full-scale diorama of an 1860s construction site high in the Sierra Nevada. It features the Gov. Stanford, a 4-4-0 steam locomotive originally built in 1862 by Norris Locomotive Works. The Gov. Stanford entered service on November 9, 1863 and was used in the construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad in North America by Central Pacific Railroad bearing road number 1. It was Central Pacific's first locomotive and it is named in honor of Leland Stanford.

The museum has its origins in 1937, when a group of railroad enthusiasts in the San Francisco Bay Area formed the Pacific Coast Chapter of the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society. This organization worked for years to promote the idea of a railroad museum, donating 30 historic locomotives and cars to the California Department of Parks and Recreation to be the nucleus of a State-operated museum in Sacramento. The Museum's first facility, the Central Pacific Railroad Passenger Station, opened in 1976. The Railroad History Museum was completed in 1981. Steam-powered passenger train service on the Sacramento Southern Railroad began in 1984, with the Central Pacific Railroad Freight Depot opening three years later. Railtown 1897 State Historic Park in Jamestown was added to the Museum complex during 1992.

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USA-Canada / USA-California

Lat: 38° 35' 4.65" N
Long: 122° 31' 14.02" W

Elevation: 20

→ maps.google.com [EXT]

Precision is: High. Pinpoints the exact spot.

Canon 5D with 15mm fisheye lens mounted on a Really Right Stuff spherical bracket and a Manfrotto panorama head.

This room was designed for dramatic impact on first time visitors to the museum. It's sophisticated lighting adds highlights and interest and the mirror effect of the windows on the south wall give it great depth. The light level was low, so long exposures were needed. I used the camera's auto-bracketing to capture three images over a four "ev" range (4 sec, 1 sec and .125 sec at f/5.6 & ISO 400) at each camera position. I wanted to use a smaller f-stop, but could not use the longer exposures because there were several people moving in the room. After creating three different spherical panoramas, I used Photoshop's High Dynamic Range processing to create a master file. Using HDR made it possible to get a good exposure for the brightly lit areas on the far wall and for the small wall displays. The final QTVR was made using Pano2QTVR.