I know I've seen this somewhere on the site but can't seem to find it.

I have a photograph and I want to try and copy the buildings that are in it for my next dio, the trouble is there are no people near it.

Can anyone offer any help on how to do this?

Thanks
Paul

Most exterior doors are 3 feet wide and 6 feet 8 inches tall . Hopefully that will help

Basically, you do Jim is illuding to. You take some item (a door or window) that you know the size of in 1:1. Then you start segmenting the photo down to comparison measuring. Scale the 1:1 down and get a 1/35 scale ruler for the drawing and then start measuring each piece.
There is a bit of 'guest-a-measuring' too.

Google Sketch-Up

It's free software that will let you import a photo and set it to scale (so you take measurements from it).

Although this is a good rule of thumb you should remember that this figure is a fairly recent standardisation for doors, in fact the doors could be almost any size from as little as 2 1/2 foot wide -- anything really. The heights varied greatly also. The poorer the type of house the smaller the doors, the richer the house the larger the doors, it was largely due to the finances of construction.

The same goes for windows as well. In England, some of window sizes related to the window taxation that was brought in in the middle ages, ie; the larger your windows and more glass they contained the more tax you had to pay, so the poor only had small windows and often no glass.

Houses varied quite a bit in general anyway, go into posh Victorian house and the ground floor could have ceilings 15 ft plus, I have personally worked in houses in Brighton with 20ft plus ceiling heights. 1st floor ceiling heights are more like ceiling heights of today, though not always that 'small'. Then as floors went up ceilings came down,servants quarters in the attic were often so cramped that, even with the shorter victorian, they had to walk around stooped over so as not to bang their heads.

As you can surmise from my above lecture, and although it is probably good idea to have a height benchmark to work from, it isn't absolutely necessary as even neighbouring houses can be quite different. Hope this helps

I have an Excel application I developed to help scaling from photos. So far, the feedback from those who have used it has been positive.

Give me your email address and I'll be glad to send it to you.....and anyone else who wants it.

Dave

Holy cow!!! Let's hope they don't hear of that one on this side of the pond! We'd have to rewrite Turbo Tax.

Dave (the CPA)