Long time friend and collaborator Grahame Knott of Deeper Dorset decided he wanted some art to hang in the house. Whatever was going to hang needed to be relevant and big enough to fill the wall in a single image.
With everything in life, size matters and the opportunity to print an ortho photo was too good to miss.
Grahame liked the detail captured in the ortho photo of the SS Gwladmena, a steamship now lying in 38m in Bressay Sound, Shetland.
Underwater: Wreck of SS Gwladmena by Deep3D on Sketchfab
The Gwladmena triggered a few ‘firsts’; the first complete and large wreck to be modelled, the first to be scanned and aligned over two dives and the first to apply sonar derived GPS data (kindly provided by Kevin Heath of Sula Diving) to locate.
Size Really Is Everything
At 68m long the distance needed to cover the wreck was exhausting. Physical exertion at depth is asking for a bend. The Gwladmena experience triggered some problem solving and thus inadvertently gave birth to the Heart of Gold.
The model was processed back in 2016 and the hardware at the time dictated a lot of downsampling. The ortho photo was the real treat; generated at 1.5mm per pixel the level of detail was stunning. Until now presenting such an image on the internet has been problematic; at 3.14Gb no viewer would cope.
Since then those nice folk Dronelabs have developed an online viewer and enabled the sharing and viewing of ortho photos online…even on a mobile device:
Science Meets Art
In this digital world tangible things remain desirable. Grahame wanted a big print, so we printed it big. The level of detail is going to keep a viewer occupied for a while and under 6mm acrylic the piece makes a statement about its owner and their interests.
As a work of art the ortho photo makes a statement. As a scaled record of what is on the seabed the ortho photo delivers evidence and a reliable record of a point in time.
Its an art-meets-science perfect storm.