The LUMCON Lawn

Image above: LUMCON, Cocodrie, the bayou, and the marsh beyond from the Canon S95 that Mathew and I flew with the Fled at sunset on Thursday, November 1.

I have tried to align kite aerial photos in Photoshop before, but this is the first time I have felt almost in control of the process of making a large map (orthophoto). I got to meet Stewart Long at the PLOTS Barn Raising and talk to him about this process, which he has perfected. I used part of his new map of LUMCON as the base map and aligned 82 photos on top of it. The canvas was 30,000 pixels across, even though some of the kite photos were higher resolution than that. The goal of the flight and the aligning was to create the data from which a vegetation community map can be made, and the clonal patches of plants are going to make it an interesting map. I removed the few images I had of the top of the building so Stewart's image could show through.

I still have to learn to use GDAL (OMG command line) so I can georeference this image and create a tile set that can become part of the PLOTS map archive. I should also work on a wiki with instructions for using Photoshop (File/Place, select_image, Enter, right_click/rasterize_layer, click_handle, right_click/Distort, drag_handles, Enter, make-transparent, repeat_distort_part_again...).

The mapping flight was with the PLOTS dual-camera infrared camera rig, so I will have to do the aligning process all over again with the NRG and NDVI images. Oh boy.

For now, the full resolution image is below embedded from Gigapan, or you can see it at Gigapan (for full screen click on symbol on the left side) where you can sign up and make snapshots.
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