Where were you 1 yr. ago?

[Benzadmiral]

If Hurricane Katrina affected you directly, where were you one year ago today?

Three hundred sixty-five days ago, at this hour (7:20 am CDT), I was at the wheel of the C230. Fleeing, with Miss Linda and our three cats, heading roughly north and west -- somewhere halfway between Erwinville, LA, and College Station, TX.

Though we didn't know it yet, for us the worst was over.

How about you?
.

[TX76513]

They turned the power grid off at 11 AM - then the fun started

[John Doe]

I was on the phone with MedMech, asking him to post a query on the diesel forum as to what ratio SVO I could run in my e300 to avoid the fuel lines. 24 hours later, I was digging my camping gear out of my shed and moving into my office (that had power).

[Dee8go]

I was sitting right here. Thanking God that I live here rather than in New Orleans or vicinity.

I know of people in NC who still haven't recovered from Hurricane Floyd which was at least 3-4 years ago. Has life gotten anywhere near normal down there (LA, MI, or TX) yet?

[Botnst]

Getting ready to fly an observation flight across the impact area. Little did we know what we'd see.

[Dee8go]

Wow, I bet that was an awesome sight. Even more so if you were flying over your own home.

[Botnst]

Originally Posted by Dee8go

Wow, I bet that was an awesome sight. Even more so if you were flying over your own home.

Flew over my sister's home in Slidell. She had huge loblolly pines that crashed directly toward her house like a teepee and none of them hit her house. It looked like her place was annhilated from the air but she didn't even need to re-shingle the whole thing. Weird.

The most dramatic destruction from the air was the Mississippi Gulf Coast over to Bayou La Batre, Alabama. I couldn't find landmarks at all, it was as though somebody had shaved from the coast inland from about 200 yards to a half-mile. One neighborhood in Gulfport-Long Beach area (I couldn't tell for sure) it looked like a cargo vessel loaded with giant rolls of paper had lost it's load, dumping giant rolls all up through a neighborhood. As though a toilet paper truck had overturned, but the rolls looked 6 ft in diameter. Weird.

I can't tell you how many thousands of boats I saw washed deep into the marsh, all but inaccessible. Also the thousands of flooded cars. Be very careful buying a used car for the next few years.

B

[Dee8go]

Do you have any photographs from that, Bot? The abstraction of aerial photography, especially if the light is right (low angle, early morning, late afternoon) is very dramatic and shows up a lot of the surface texture. I'd like to see what that looked like.

Don't you live in or around New Orleans?

[kamil]

I was here creating a thread that reached immense proportions...something along the lines of "hurricane victims screaming racism".........

Yeah, that thread went on for a long time and I got my butt chewed out there too for saying that all LOOTERS should be shot on the spot.

[Honus]

The early reports on Katrina were that things weren't so bad, that they dodged a bullet, etc. So, on the morning of the day the levees broke, I sent a letter to a lawyer in New Orleans. It was about 10:00 a.m. My letter said something like, "I am glad to see Katrina went easy on you guys." Needless to say, I had to eat some crow over that one. That guy was shut down for months.

[Hatterasguy]

I was watching it on the news, and on MS hoping members in that area were ok. I'm so far away I think all we got was a bit of rain from what was left of Katrina.

[Botnst]

Originally Posted by Dee8go

Do you have any photographs from that, Bot? The abstraction of aerial photography, especially if the light is right (low angle, early morning, late afternoon) is very dramatic and shows up a lot of the surface texture. I'd like to see what that looked like.

Don't you live in or around New Orleans?

I took about 2,000 mostly aerial obliques, natural color. The photos are mostly 4M Jpegs.

I live west of NOLA.

[Dee8go]

You are shooting digital aerial pictures? How's that working out for you? I've had customers tell me they weren't satisfied with them. Some have even bought darkroom equipment again to be able to print from film again.

I don't know what they're looking for exactly that isn't clear enough on the digital images. could just be a case of "I liked it better the old way."

[Botnst]

Originally Posted by Dee8go

You are shooting digital aerial pictures? How's that working out for you? I've had customers tell me they weren't satisfied with them. Some have even bought darkroom equipment again to be able to print from film again.

I don't know what they're looking for exactly that isn't clear enough on the digital images. could just be a case of "I liked it better the old way."

I think a significant proportion of old photographers are as you suggest, wedded to what they know. The neat thing about film is all of the ways one can push and burn and so forth, when one thoroughly understands the process. It really is artistry and to be good at it takes a tremendous amount of experience and a really good eye. Folks who have that knack will see their creativity and artistry decline when shifting to digital and Photoshop.

On the other hand, younger people who have never learned darkroom techniques are not burdened with preconceptions concerning digital imagery. They ust whup-out the Photoshop and let fly with all of the tools available. It kills us old farts to see them do things in a few minutes that would take a darkroom photographer days to get accomplished.

For what I do in aerial obliques, digital is just fine. We call it ephemeral data collection--things that have extreme value but only for a short period of time. Say, 4 meters of saltwater pushed into a freshwater marsh that stays in-place for a few hours or a day. If you don't get a salinometer into the water, you better get a picture or nobody will ever know what happened and saltwater can have effects that linger for decades. Without the knowledge of how it got there, the extent and duration, you're just guessing when you see a dead area 20 years later.

So after hurricanes we fly about 100 - 200ft off the surface and take photos out of the open window. At a higher altitude there are satellites and aircraft capturing vertical imagery, but without a ground visit, you're often left to guess what it is you think you see. So we use low-altitude oblique photos in lieu of a visit to a particular site--what we call ground-truthing.

Now as far as high-end aerial imagery, no question that film is still superior in 3 respects:

1. Better spectral resolution, ie more and better colors.
2. Better spatial resolution at any given altitude and any given lense system. (but this is changing)
3. Stereoscopy is much better with film. In fact, digital stereo is just not especially useful for high res work.

Digital is much more consistent across a frame and between frames (for frame-type cameras. There is another sensor system, a scanner such as Leica's ADS-40 that uses a completely different technique. It has a continuous scan sweeping perpendicular to the flight path).

Digital geometric and chromatic corrections are farm simpler and quicker.

Digital duplication is exact.

Digital images get squirted into a computer with little effort.

At this time for our very specialized purposes, scanned film is the best accommodation for getting data into a GIS--our final product. We are just beginning to shift from optical stereoscopes to digital stereometry, so I can't say anything at this point about the accuracy on the digital stereo side. What we do is use the optical stereoscope and a computer simultaneously looking through the stereoscope to get an understanding of spatial relations then drawing the map onscreen. It's kind of kludgy, but we still haven't enough confidence in the computer to surplus the stereoscopes.

I realize that this is probably not what you were asking, so I'll just sort of give you my bottom line.

I'm going digital.

bot