***Under Construction (Mar. 2018)***
My research group was among the early adopters of photo-based 3D reconstruction techniques - more commonly referred to as photogrammetry and Structure-from-Motion - in paleoseismic and neotectonic studies. My exploration of these techniques initially grew out of the desire to produce better photomosaics (photographic base maps) for mapping deformed sediments in paleoseismic investigations, and we have now expanded our implementations to include 3D reconstruction of cosmogenic sampling targets, development of point clouds and DEMs from archival aerial photographs, local scale topographic models from drones and hand-held photography, and full 3D models of paleoseismic trenches. Below are several examples of these applications, shared through the interactive 3D viewing/hosting website Sketchfab.
There are numerous resources for learning about these techniques, but one resource I helped develop with collaborators from the UK and Australia can be found here (PDF).
This model, fully viewable and interactive in 3D, is constructed from dozens of overlapping oblique photographs taken with a wide angle lens on my Nikon D7000 as I walked through one of our trenches at the Elizabeth Lake paleoseismic site on the southern San Andreas fault. If you enter the model viewer and rotate the model, you'll see that the walls, floor, and a portion of one end of the trench is reconstructed here. If you align with one end of the trench and zoom in, you will 'enter' the trench and not only see the stratigraphy features of the trench stratigraphy, you'll also see portions of the hydraulic shores used to ensure safety in the trench and boards laid across the shores to enable access to the higher portions of the walls.