During the first few years of current programme, finding sites was rudimentary. We flew armed with pieces of fluttering maps, sheafs of large black and white photographs of what the landscape and site looked like in 1953 and with the knowledge of the pilots of what we were looking for. It worked and we seldom missed a site but it was inefficient and suitable only for the experimental phase of the project.
Since c. 2000 we have had the use of a GPS. Despite initial problems with reliability, finding enough satellites, accuracy of the maps from which we drew our co-ordinates, it was a significant advance. It also provided us with a Track of the route actually flown each time. Until 2006 we relied on the improving technology of GPS navigation founded on precise co-ordinates taken from maps. The latter were the weak link – the maps were inaccurate.
Starting in 2007 it became possible to utilize Google Earth (GE) to identify sites and use the much more reliable co-ordinates to be derived from that. The weakness was that GE was uneven – some sections were very high resolution but many were poor or hopeless.
Early in 2008 the Landsat imagery used by GE for Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine was replaced by French SPOT Image. At a stroke the overall quality was improved dramatically and much of the land surface was readable in quite fine detail. Some areas – few but still significant - are still poor. In general, however, it is possible to explore almost the entire land surface of Jordan on GE and to use it to define the locations of sites which can then be flown and photographed in the appropriate conditions.
A further breakthrough in 2008 was the use for the first time of the Nikon D3 digital camera. In addition to providing a full-frame facility and superb quality imagery via a Nikkor 24-70 mm lens, it is GPS-enabled which allowed every frame to have the co-ordinates embedded in its metadata by means of a Geopic II Geotagging device mounted in the hotshoe. The D3 camera provides immediate back-up onto its second flashcard slot and an immediate operation after every flight was to download all imagery onto not just individual laptops but collectively onto a single external hard drive which was itself backed up on a second.
All imagery is imported into Adobe Lightroom 2 which allows sophisticated management including not just basic identifiers of each site (unique photo label and site name) but attachment of multiple keywords. From Lightroom we can upload photographs to Flickr which in turn is accessed from elsewhere on this web site.
