Measuring a face

from a distance
a clinometer and a tape beat everything

Stand back a measured distance, read the angle to the top and the angle to the base, and the height follows. It needs no camera, no calibration and no software, and on a cliff you cannot climb it is still the most accurate thing available.

If you cannot measure the distance either

Take the angle from two points on the same line, a measured baseline apart. The height follows from the two angles alone — the baseline is the only length you need, and it can be paced along ground you can walk.

A photograph on its own has no scale at all — a model and a mountain make the same picture. Give it one known length, or the distance and the lens, and every pixel becomes a measurement.

This assumes the face is flat and square to the camera. Anything oblique is foreshortened, and anything nearer the lens than the rest is magnified — which is why a scale bar has to be on the face itself, not leaning at the bottom of it.

Two photographs from a measured distance apart give depth, because a near point shifts more between them than a far one. That shift is the parallax, and the depth is Z = f·B/d — focal length times baseline over the shift. It is how every stereo pair, every drone survey and both your eyes work.

Focal length in pixels, not millimetres: it is the image width divided by twice the tangent of half the field of view. The conversion is done for you on the planning tab.

the part people get wrong before they leave

A reconstruction fails in the field, not in the software. It needs overlap, convergence and a scale bar — and no amount of processing recovers a set of photographs that lacks them.

rulewhy
Next door

Once the face is measured, the planes on it are read in Structural analysis and their stability in Geotechnical. Measuring grains rather than a cliff — the same idea at a hand-lens scale, with a coin for the scale bar — is in the Loupe.

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