Aerial Photography: Coal Oil Point Reserve

Recently presented with the opportunity to submit a photograph to an ecological photo contest on campus, I’ve been working on cleaning up some of my recent balloon and kite aerial photography flights.  This photo was taken with my hot air balloon rig, which is now retired due to safety concerns, a few years ago at Sands Beach at Coal Oil Point Reserve near Santa Barbara.  The site is one of the University of California’s Natural Reserves.  I’ve stitched a bunch of photos together using Hugin, then cropped the scene down to a rectangle so it would be more pleasing to the audience.  The jagged edges of the stitched scene would probably be confusing to many unfamiliar with the process.  The black squares in the image are targets that I made to help georeference the scene, something that has proven to be more difficult than most GIS analysts would suspect.