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needs a little TLC!
Today sees the launch of Britain From Above - a seriously impressive archive of 16,000 aerial views of Blighty taken between 1919 to 1953. The images were acquired for the nation in 2007 when aerial photography outfit Aerofilms fell on hard times, and following "a painstaking process of conservation and cataloguing", can now …
he following error was encountered while trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/
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It shouldn't be giving out internal IP addresses just because to many reg readers have clicked the link.
RROR
The requested URL could not be retrieved
The following error was encountered while trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/
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The remote host or network may be down. Please try the request again.
Your cache administrator is webadmins@scran.ac.uk.
well done Lester and El Reg
I was enamoured by the caption of the photograph of Wembley Stadium by the Daily Fail:
<blockquote please>Wembley Stadium hosts the 1935 FA Cup final, which Sheffield Wednesday won by beating West Bromwich Albion 4-2. The Cierva autogyro in the foreground was flown by Scotland Yard, experimenting with air observation to monitor crowds.</blockquote please>
In 1935!
It is actually working. However, they have a message on the front page advising that:
"Launch day - high web traffic
We are currently experiencing a very high volume of traffic due to the popularity of the site on launch day - today, 25 June. We apologise if you are having any difficulties accessing our web pages. Please try again later, when the problems should be resolved"
Only had time for a peek, due to slow loading, but will try later. Aerial photos taken in the 1930s and 1940s set the world of medieval history reeling with delight, as the remains of abandoned medieval villages (yes, and some Roman remains) were visible in low-angled light. The depopulation of England in the series of plagues after 1348 meant many villages were utterly lost, sometimes even the names gone from local memory. By using the photographs, archaeologists could find and excavate sites undisturbed for centuries, and huge amounts of important information was recovered. Being an ex-mediaevalist, I have a soft spot for these photos.
Many years ago, after a very dry summer, I was amazed to see the outlines of some sort of cloistered building at the foot of Harrow Hill, from it's summit. A friends mum, who had lived nearby, and whose mum had lived there back to the 1870s was adamant that nothing had stood there in (their) living memory.
The 'Britain from Above' web site is very disappointing. It's good these images are now online but they're aerial photographs so why has the site posted such low quality photographs? Plate cameras have enormous resolution and even ordinary film cameras are capable of much better resolution than the photos posted here.
Moreover there's only the gallery and intermediate resolution images available which is hardly satisfactory--the image of St Paul's I checked was only 820 x 649px! Shame they'd not copied the Library of Congress method of presenting photos where multiple image sizes are available from thumbnails through to large TIF files of 7500 x 6072px (file sizes typically 80-200MB). For example, even in this 150-year old image from the LOC collection the large 7500 x 6072px TIF file is 86.9MB:
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/cwp/item/cwp2003000014/PP/
and there are much larger files than this one amongst other images.
You might well ask why anyone would want such a large TIF file from 150 years ago. Well, I chose this image example to illustrate just this point. In the long line of soldiers in the photograph, there's one guy in the back row (towards the RHS) that stands out from the others by what he's doing (download the large TIF to find out). The fact is unless we'd had access to this large TIF then his actions would most likely have gone unnoticed (as he's hardly recognizable in the lower resolution images). As this example attests, when it comes to historical images, we need very bit of resolution we can get.
The quality of Library of Congress images is, by and large, excellent as they're scanned with a resolution that's close to the Nyquist limit--or at least within spitting distance of it (also the dynamic range/linearity is excellent). Scanning at the Nyquist limit (two times the smallest discernible transition) ensures that most of the data is captured from the original.
As far as quality goes, most images on the net are pretty terrible, and unfortunately 'Britain from Above' is following in that mould (a la British Museum, Imperial War Museum, etc., etc., the images from all of which are unquestioningly substandard). The net and new hi-res displays* mean that people now have the capability to examine historical and other images in truly fine detail as never before but the web sites are choosing not to make the images available. It seems to me that there should be much more uproar over this.
_
* Only a week or two ago El Reg had an article on the ultra high def TV standard which incidentally is 7680 x 4320px--a huge increase in definition over 1080i hi-def. Clearly, hi-res is the way technology is going, thus the quality of web sites must be comparable or users will lose interest.
Because:
It is a wretched taste to be gratified with mediocrity when the excellent lies before us. ... [Isaac Disraeli]
There is an infinite difference between a little wrong and just right, between fairly good and the best, between mediocrity and superiority. ... [Orison S.Marden]
Wah, wah, wah.
It was free. Stop looking at it if you hate it. Spend your own money to make your own if you have the need. Call your elected official and offer to help if you want to make yourself useful. Fix it if you own it.
Bitching about something you have no control over and are not charged anything for the privilege of using in public forums just looks whiny and pathetic, no matter how you church it up with quotations. All's it shows is that you have the power of wikipedia at your fingertips in a pretense of thinking ignoble thoughts in a noble way. Devil, scripture, own purposes, you know the drill.
Since I can't be bothered to come up with my own quotations, I guess your quest for excellence in smart-assed repertoire will just have to suffer.
Cheers!
"You might well ask why anyone would want such a large TIF file from 150 years ago. Well, I chose this image example to illustrate just this point. In the long line of soldiers in the photograph, there's one guy in the back row (towards the RHS) that stands out from the others by what he's doing (download the large TIF to find out)."
I waited AGES for it to download, and what did I see? Just some guy looking towards the camera while all the other soldiers are looking away from the camera. Please tell me that's not all it is - I was really hoping for something interesting.