Thursday, July 21st: Aerial Photography at Birdwood

Today we returned to Birdwood and were accompanied by Arin Bennett from the UVA Library and Shayne Brandon from IATH. Arin brought with him a DGI quadcopter called Inspire. He showed us how it works and best practices for using a quadcopter, and then we began flying over Birdwood. We were able to get photos and video of the main house, the smokehouse, the water tower, the area where formal gardens were planned, as well as the backyard and terraced field near the stone slave cabin. The photos and video are very high quality and we hope to use them in a variety of ways. To make our website more interactive, we can combine video, still images, and students narrating to create something in iMovie regarding our questions about Birdwood. We can also use the photos the quadcopter took to better understand the roofing system of the smokehouse. This will be very helpful when working with Lauren Massari on our 3D models, as the laser scan data fro Will Rourk isn’t able to fully capture the roof. Thank you to Arin and Shayne for joining us and sharing their expertise with the quadcopter. The aerial photos and video are great!