I am often asked about the photography which is used as the basis for the People's Map. The photography comes from Getmapping's Millennium Map, which was started in 1999. Our idea was to create and maintain a map-accurate, seamless colour photograph of the whole of Britain and make it available to all users at affordable prices.
Detail of the New Digital Aerial Photography
It is extraordinary to think that in those days most people had never seen an aerial photograph of their house or village. Most aerial photography was commissioned by individual Local Authorities which owned the data outright and did not make it available to anybody outside the council. The market was limited almost entirely to 'oblique' photographs taken by private pilots and sold door-to-door.
In the early days we used film cameras to capture the photography on 9 inch square negatives, and the first complete photograph of England and Wales, which was completed in 2001, used 27 kilometers of film which all had to be developed and scanned. We had over 200 people working to stitch all the 34,000 photographs together into a seamless map-accurate 'mosaic' which at that time was the largest seamless photograph ever made. We then put the whole of the Millennium Map onto our website (http://www.getmapping.com/) so that, for the first time, everybody had access to aerial photography of the whole country. We also started to make and sell various products based on the photography such as the England Photographic Atlas (the heaviest book ever published by Harper Collins) and Photoscape (a 3D DVD that allowed users to fly around the country in 3D.
In 2004 we switched to digital cameras and the resulting photography is much sharper and easier to manage. We aim to renew the photography on a 5 year timescale, but the terrible summers we have had for the last two years have put us rather behind schedule. We are hoping for a long hot summer next year.
In the early days we used film cameras to capture the photography on 9 inch square negatives, and the first complete photograph of England and Wales, which was completed in 2001, used 27 kilometers of film which all had to be developed and scanned. We had over 200 people working to stitch all the 34,000 photographs together into a seamless map-accurate 'mosaic' which at that time was the largest seamless photograph ever made. We then put the whole of the Millennium Map onto our website (http://www.getmapping.com/) so that, for the first time, everybody had access to aerial photography of the whole country. We also started to make and sell various products based on the photography such as the England Photographic Atlas (the heaviest book ever published by Harper Collins) and Photoscape (a 3D DVD that allowed users to fly around the country in 3D.
In 2004 we switched to digital cameras and the resulting photography is much sharper and easier to manage. We aim to renew the photography on a 5 year timescale, but the terrible summers we have had for the last two years have put us rather behind schedule. We are hoping for a long hot summer next year.
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