Thursday 14 May 2009

Geo Photo

Fallen sign - Slingsby, North Yorkshire, UK

The last couple of weeks have been busy. I started a little project from an idea developed during the winter. I'm photographing where i live. It sounds easy but I've had to really think about what and where I'm taking images because this project involves geographically locating images to where they were taken.

The website I'm using for this is called panoramio. You may have come across images stored on this website if you use Google Earth. The process is straightforward. You upload your image to the website and then place a marker on a map to locate where the image was taken. Simple. The tricky part is working out what you photograph to represent the location in the best way. Before i started on the project i made some rules to work by, just to make things easier for me. Most of these rules concern privacy which involved being very careful what filled the viewfinder. No individual houses or business premises and nothing that could constitute an invasion of someone's privacy.

The photographs form a visual landscape of the village's landmarks, like the church and village green, without giving away to much about residential life. Maybe I'm being a little too cautious but I don't want to be accused of invasion of privacy by anyone. Hopefully in about two or three months, after they have been reviewed and cleared, my images will be available to view in Google Earth at the location they were taken at. It will be interesting to see if there is any reaction... good or bad.

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