Photo Interpretation - Lab 2

If I have to say one thing about doing this course with no GIS experience, it is definitely helping my Intro to GIS course that I am taking at the same time.  I constantly have to bounce between lesson materials from both classes so I can figure out how to do what I need to do.  It is a lot at times, but the more I do this, the more familiar I hope to get with the tools.

So Lab 2, Visual Interpretation.  This lab was all about learning how to identify features and attributes on a photograph.  Different photographs were used to include grey scale, true color, and false color.  The first exercise focused on a grey scale photograph and the objective was to identify different tonal and texture levels on the map.  The map below illustrates what I identified for the different tones and textures.

The second exercise focused on identifying different features based on shape, size, shadow, pattern, and associations.  This I found to be more fun as I quickly recognized the map to be Pensacola Beach from what appeared to be 1970.  It was interesting to spot the key features that are still there and also take note of what is no longer there as much has been developed in 47 years.  Have a look at what I came up with in the map below.  

While the final exercise in this lab did not require an output map to be created, I still went through and identified 5 features on a true color photograph and noted what I thought they were and what colors they were.  The interesting point came when the false color photograph was put over the top and seeing how the features I selected changed colors.  While I am sure my interpretations of what the colors are slightly skewed due to my color blindness, there were clear shifts in color going from the true color photograph to the false color.  

Over all this lab was fun, albeit a little tedious as I am still learning ArcGIS.  But the more I work with it, the easier I am sure it will be further down the road.