David Connolly’s excellent 3D view of one of the large - and seriously endangered, monumental tombs beyond the walls of Roman Gerasa. Photographs are a mixture of his ground photographs and others taken from the air as part of the Aerial Archaeology in Jordan project. Click here to view the Jerash Mausoleum 3D model
He has also made a 3D model of Kh. el-Beddiyeh - an excavated settlement site in the Ajlun Highlands.
We started a YouTube account for APAAME to share a few 123DCatch 3D reconstructions Mat Dalton had experimented with back in 2012: APAAMEvideo.
We have since started taking video footage along side still photography during our flights, and last week I uploaded a taster of footage of Qasr el-Uweinid, and most recently, one of Qasr Aseikhim. These are a test release of what shall be a channel for footage that has been taken by the Aerial Archaeology in Jordan Project. Due to issues with internet connection in Amman, we have not been able to upload the videos in as high a quality as we would like - please watch this space for new uploads!
Depending on how many hands are free, we use a GoPro borrowed from a colleague at the University of Western Australia, and a Canon XA10 Video Camera. Due to space and convenience in the helicopter, both are hand held. Fortunately, the vibrations of the helicopter do not come through into the footage too much. As we become more familiar with the editing tools available to us, we should be able to make the footage appear smoother. At the moment, the noise and vibrations should give you a real experience of what it is like in the Royal Jordanian Air Force's Hueys!
One of the advantages to video footage and 3D reconstructions in addition to still photography is having a vehicle to communicate depth and landscape, which is sometimes lost in the still photographs, especially when viewed in isolation. We hope you find the footage interesting and enjoyable.
Thanks to David Connolly at www.bajr.org, we've recently learnt about 123D Catch, a free beta software package that creates 3d models from photos taken at different angles. This software is a lot of fun to use, and we've spent the last day or so playing around with some images from our archive. Happily enough, the way we often photograph sites - spiralling around them in a helicopter - produces photos that are almost ideal source material for this software, and some of the early results of are pretty impressive, especially as we didn't have this technology in mind when we took the photos (see above: Khirbat Iskandar, an Early Bronze Age site on the King' s Highway in Jordan)! We are exploring this tool as a means of displaying detailed information about the sites we photograph to the public, as well as using the models as a research tool - they often reveal nuances of topography that we simply can't see from air (we found out that Burqu Kite 7 sits in a low valley that likely funelled animals into the Kite's head, for example). We'll be posting more of these fly-overs as we make them!
