Up up and away

I once worked for Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D., an archaeologist, who also wrote the Western Hemisphere archaeology Encyclopedia Britannica Yearbook summary, in "contract" archaeology who was an avid photography enthusiast. If we had archaeology, he'd have a large disk made to make photo-3D slides, or a bi-pod made to photograph the remains of a Dutch West Indies site down on Whitehall St. in Manhattan. I worked with him on Rolleimetric close-range photogrammetry as it started out, a way to document air-crashes fast before the blizzard came, a Canadian company, Prometric Technologies, assisted us, trained and worked also with Schneider Instruments, the camera filter makers, where I met the director of monuments of Mexico, they wanted a way to document the movement of huge blocks of stones in the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City. We once went out to see Ken Hansen in Connecticut, near Pepperidge Farm, where he would demonstrate an overhead system he had designed. Joel Grossman was alway looking for someway to mosaic overheads into a site plan that would show the excavations we had done, like at the West Point Foundry, in Cold Spring, NY. However, Rollei's system is more a parabola of photos that are best registered by software in space, not a refinement of photos taken from an airplane! The Hansen overhead system was composed of nested square tubes with pulleys and steel cables running within them, on a base that contained switches and video for mounting a commercial size TV camera (circa 1994) and allowed upwards of 30 feet, enabling it to see over walls (as it was at the American Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq I think he said, a reason for its construction) or down the street to see crowds, events, etc. Rollei has a pneumatic monopole system for its medium-format metric camera. Mr. Hansen was very nice and even offered a commission if I knew anyone who would be interested in purchasing it or them. I think they would make a great addition to TV news organizations, it folds into a small package (shipped once to Iraq) and set-up simply and fast, providing a vista in circumstances where often there is none. khpny19@aol.com (might be at this address once brick and mortar in NYC)