The power of Satellite photos
Ray Fortna and I were discussing potential applications of satellite photos for everyday users, as enabled by applications such as Google Earth. It’s especially powerful to be able to see how the satellite photos change over time. There are obvious applications for real estate agents, house shoppers, tourists, and so forth.Another equally compelling application is to give people a better understanding of the world and some of the bad things happening in it. Satellites can go places where journalists can’t a give a better sense of scale and impact. The following BBC photos were blogged in One Man’s Trash » from the salmon showing the destruction caused by Zimbabwe’s slum “cleanup” project.“One month ago, Zimbabwe’s brutal leader Robert Mugabe began Operation Murambatsvina, which literally translates to “Operation Drive Out Trash.” The “trash”? 250,000 to 1.5 million of Zimbabwe’s urban poor who have had their homes bulldozed or burnt down by Mugabe’s police. The newly homeless are left to sleep outside in the freezing winter nights or are being pushed into rural areas, where they face dangerous food shortages and likely starvation. “
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In general, I don’t know that I’ve found satellite photos to be particularly useful in my everyday life. But I’m addicted to Google Maps all the same. In fact, one of the few times I’ve truly regretted being a hardcore Mac guy is when I found out Google Earth wasn’t available to me.
Google’s maps are often fairly old (the Bay Bridge isn’t under construction in the SF images, for example). But that gives them another level of intrigue. I’ve really had fun going through Google Sightseeing, which has started to chronicle all the fascinating frozen moments you can find: planes flying, a street fair in San Francisco, a bowl game in Florida, oil fires in Iraq….
I agree that satellite imagery like the images you point to on my site can be pretty powerful from a raw editorial standpoint. We’re used to news reports with well-composed close-up photography from professionals. But there’s something compelling about seeing a major event or the effects of a disaster from above. Another recent example might be the before and after shots from Banda Aceh and other sites devastated by the tsunami. The personal stories and images are important, but nothing captured the sheer magnitude of the disaster like the images from on high.
For what it’s worth, the BBC images came from a company called DigitalGlobe, which offers satellite imagery to media outlets. They have an interesting gallery of sizable sample images.
By zalm on 07.01.05 1:58 am
I read a lot about this subject and how it will change many of the dynamics of how we treat things. Projects like MSN Earth and Google Earth, combined with cell tracking technology such as www.wherify.com or www.dodgeball.com are going to change the way the world interacts with information in the physical world.
~Barry
www.technicaldisaster.com
By technicaldisaster on 07.01.05 12:15 pm
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