Drawdown Composite

In 2001, the state performed a draw-down of the reservoir in order to refurbish the dam at Stillwater. While the water was low, a local man named Bill Partridge took a flight over the reservoir with mounted camera equipment on the plane facing straight down and proceeded to take his own aerial imagery of the reservoir. He then took all the developed photos and meticulously laid them out by hand, and combined them into a composite image. I had seen this image hanging on the walls of local businesses and residences at Stillwater and Beaver River, but was unable to acquire a copy until January 2016.

For the purposes of this project, the composite image was not laid out accurately enough (by hand vs computer) to take the entire image at once and lay it out over orthorectified satellite imagery. I had a local "print and copy" shop scan the entire image at high resolution. I then loaded the image into Photoshop and split the image back into its component parts, and orthorectified each individual piece as closely as I could. I then created an mbtiles output file of the new layout. There are gaps here and there where the images don't quite meet anymore, but the imagery is a great addition to the project and shows a lot of new information. I used the professionally orthorectified imagery from the USGS Landsat 7 from September 3, 2001 to accurately lay out the images from the composite.

The image below is about 8.5 MB and has been re-sized from my original scan that was about 450 MB in size. A copy of the original scanned file can be downloaded here. The original composite image print size was 11.5"x35.5". The orthorectified KMZ file of this image to load into Google Earth can be found on the "Available Imagery" page. The mbtiles output file can be found in the downloads section on the main page.