I'M EXHAUSTED, but so pleased.

[Terry Hayden]

inthedark,

Yeah, I should have mentioned that these enalargers also have lens stages that tip and tilt.

I came to this business after having a fair experience in Large Format photography - so it all made sense

Yes, the person in the practice is a photogrammetrist ( two m's - no doubt from some arcane language rules).

At the place I worked prior to starting my business, we had a monster Robertson Tri-color overhead process camera. It was put in the building and the walls were built around it. The Acti line is much more advanced and accurate.

Best of luck in your operation - we're booming out here ( left coast).

Later,
Terry

 

[David Ruby]

I saw a bunch of the 3D photo viewers (I won't attempt to spell the names) in an engineering class back in college. A whole room full of them, with piles of the stereo photos just waiting to be tossed I think. On a slow day we set one up and checked it out. It was amazing, totally 3-D. You felt like you could touch the trees! Most of the photos were of the forests in northern idaho, but I'm guessing that photos of more urban areas would be cool too.

I have a question based on one of these recent posts. Driving around Boise here, I've often noticed some large X's or painted in odd places. Could these be some of these markers?

We use aerial photographs quite often in the early stages of design (I'm an architect), to help the building and the site design fit into the area. I love to look at older aerials to see how much this area has changed in the last 50 years. Boise is growing so quickly that it really is amazing to see what was. I can't remember who does it, but someone around here actually "stitches" the photos together and makes a large mosaic of the entire valley each year. You obviously can't see a whole lot of detail fro that high up, but it is nice to see everything at once.

Not that it really applies to this group, but just in case anyone is interested...there are quite a few websites out there with all sorts of aerial photo's. Here in Boise you can get the entire metro area at http://www.compassidaho.org/maps/2003aerials/2003map.html This is a planning agency and the photos are actually done by the Fed's so they are public domain. I assume that many areas have something similar.

This site... http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ has photos from way way up from satellites, as does this one...http://www.spaceimaging.com/ which has a nice gallery page.

This site...Dead Link Removed has all sorts of capabilities, but from what I've found the photos are a bit old. They can be cool too though.

 

[Terry Hayden]

David,

Yup, those are probably for photogrammetry.

The "stitching" you mention all done digitally now. I've been at it long enough to have learned the old manual processes. We would "rectify" ( bring to scale and reduce tip and tilt effects) each image first.

It was important to make the enlargement on the lightest weight fiber paper possible. Even with rectified images features wouldn't necessarily match from one photo to another.

Once you had your prints, you'd soak them down and glue them onto masonite or some other stiff backing. The reason for the light weight paper was to allow you to manually stretch the paper to make things fit better. It was critical to keep the paper grain going in the same direction in all the prints ) to avoid differential stretch).

Anyway - more trivia - photogrammetry is used in Architecture as well. Stereo photos are taken of building facades and then they are mapped.

Later,
Terry