What an aerial view can and cannot tell you about a course

[John Connolly]

There are obvious characteristics of a course an aerial view cannot speak to - topography and its attendant elevation changes, subtle ground contours, land movement, "feel" (whatever that may be). But surely something can be gleaned of a course by studying it from the perspective of a migrating Canadian goose. No?

[Tom_Doak]

While I was at Cornell, one of the oddest courses I was required to take was "Interpreting Aerial Photographs."  At the time, I didn't think I'd learned much, but with the advent of Google Earth I realized how valuable this was.


You would be surprised at how much one can guess about a site from looking at aerials.  Topography is often brought out by shadows [and certainly by stereo photography which they use to make topo maps].  One can locate key trees and other features precisely, and even get a good educated guess about the soils [pines and scrub oak are more likely to be growing on sandy ground; thickets are likely to be wetlands; etc.].

[Craig Disher]

Features such as bunker depth, tree height and size of mounds can be determined if shadows are present and the date of the photograph is known. As Tom mentioned, the stereo views have shown mounds and slopes that are difficult to detect on a single aerial.

[Jason Topp]

Wind is the most difficult aspect to get a feel for from an aerial.  I have on a few ocassions resorted to wind rose diagrams that are available on the web to get a feel for how a course plays.  Accoundting for a strong prevailing wind can greatly enhance your ability to anticipate the difficulty of a hole. 
I suspect it takes a ton of practice to get a great feel for topography from an aerial.  I have learned to guess from shadows and by comparing wet and dry ground which can provide pretty good clues on areas that do not case much in the way of shadows.
The most depressing aspect of looking at aerials is figuring out how short my tee ball actually carries.

[Phil Young]

Especially on older aerials, especially those from the 20s & 30s, one has to be very careful in interpreting locations of features due to the height from which the photograph was taken and how large an area was photographed.

They certainly can be sued to date specific features and changes to a golf course. This especially so in courses that underwent numerous changes in a relatively short period of time. By that I mean over a decade or two.

They are extremely valuable in telling the story of how a wide-open farm-land type of setting would become a forest in which one might find a gingerbread house...

[Peter Pallotta]

John -
funny you should mention it, because I happen to know a Canadian goose who once had occasion to wing his way from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. He told me that, when he first looked down and saw the wide strips of verdant green grass and ponds of glistening blue water amongst the scrubby and baked-out desert-browns, he was completely disoriented and confused. Even several years later, he says that he still finds the sight of such striking incongruity unsettling, and absurd. Now, this particular goose is not a bad goose, though he is rather limited and perhaps narrow-minded in his thinking. But from his point of view up high in the sky, the excess and hubris of all this (his words, not mine) disturb him deeply, plain and simple; and, as reasonable as Canadian geese tend to be, on this topic he has very little interest in discussion or opposing points of view.  Viscerally, it struck him as wrong and misguided, these extremes of pleasures-satisfied, and reminded him of when he once flew over Amarillo Texas and saw a sign in a restaurant window advertising 72 ounce steaks for dinner. He said to me about that: "I hope I don't offend anyone, but you people have truly missed the mark and lost your minds when what you think of as a pleasant indulgence -- i.e. trying to eat 5 pounds of meat in one sitting, and getting your meal free if you do -- actually makes you sick".
Peter

[Kalen Braley]

Funny you should mention this...
 
You can easily glean from an aerial that one hole's fairway, like say #7 at Pasatiempo. is only half as wide as the rest of the holes on the course.  It would be a lot more difficult to do that on the ground....

[Joe Hancock]

Peter,

I just read your response out loud to my bride, and we both are wiping tears from our eyes as we stumble towards the library shelf to get a dictionary so we can look up the 8 words in your story that we have no idea what they mean......The first being Canadian Goose, which even our grandson knows is a Canada Goose(understand that we know it was first referred to incorrectly in the original post, and you were fully aware of that in your response).

I think I may give GCA.com the rest of the day off, just savor your story.

[Peter Pallotta]

Joe - I wasn't referring to a "Canada Goose", but instead to a goose that just happens to be Canadian!*
Thank you.

Peter

* Actually, that's not true. It's a lie, actually. I did mean "Canada Goose". Your grandson got it right, and I got it wrong.

[John Connolly]

Craig and Tom,


Are these "stereo views" commissioned? Or are they available through proper web-searching?

[Bruce Katona]

Tom Doak:

At Rutgers, the coourse taught to learn to interpret air photos (radar imagry, etc) was called "Remote Sensing".  Since we're about the same age, Google Earth & GPS didn't exist as yet for the masses.  What we see today on the internet would have been military grade back in the day.

[Jason Topp]

Craig and Tom,


Are these "stereo views" commissioned? Or are they available through proper web-searching?

When we had them done it was by combining two similar aerials of the same location at the same time.  If you looked at each one with each eye the 3d nature would pop out (this was pre-internet).  I recall that the scale looked off but experts were able to convert that view into a topo map.
Unfortunately we were looking at superfund sites rather than golf courses.

[Jay Mickle]

Jason,
I have no idea what you are talking about. Of course I can't see out of my left eye and if that prevents me from seeing seeing these 3D images perhaps I am entitled to some form of government assistance. I am going to call my congresswomen now.

[Tom_Doak]

Funny you should mention this...
 
You can easily glean from an aerial that one hole's fairway, like say #7 at Pasatiempo. is only half as wide as the rest of the holes on the course.  It would be a lot more difficult to do that on the ground....

I was thinking more about how I could use the info for design purposes.  But you are right to point this out.  Moreover, today it is easy to come up with the dimensions of any famous hole of feature you want to know about, in 2-D at least.  You can see for yourself just how wide the Road green is, and what angle it's set to the line of play.  You can see just how narrow or wide the fairways at Shinnecock and Pine Valley really are, or how small the greens are at Harbour Town, or how far away from the greens the guarding bunkers are set at certain famous links. 


It is not everything you want to know about design -- design is 3-D and not 2-D -- but it's way more information than you could find 20 years ago.

[Andrew Simpson]

Wind is the most difficult aspect to get a feel for from an aerial.  I have on a few ocassions resorted to wind rose diagrams that are available on the web to get a feel for how a course plays.  Accoundting for a strong prevailing wind can greatly enhance your ability to anticipate the difficulty of a hole. 
I suspect it takes a ton of practice to get a great feel for topography from an aerial.  I have learned to guess from shadows and by comparing wet and dry ground which can provide pretty good clues on areas that do not case much in the way of shadows.
The most depressing aspect of looking at aerials is figuring out how short my tee ball actually carries.

I've always found that sepia photos were the best indicator of wind direction unless the subject in the photo included a windsock or a kite flyer. Though with the right wind pattern on the matching mountain it would look like a flat field, go figure!

[Steve Lang]

Joe - I wasn't referring to a "Canada Goose", but instead to a goose that just happens to be Canadian!*
Thank you.

Peter

* Actually, that's not true. It's a lie, actually. I did mean "Canada Goose". Your grandson got it right, and I got it wrong.

I thought the Canada Goose travelled down I-75 along The Dixie Hwy, not I-40 when in the USA.. but The Big Texan can be seen from space, let alone above the interstate
 

http://bigtexan.com

[Craig Disher]

Craig and Tom,


Are these "stereo views" commissioned? Or are they available through proper web-searching?

John,
The stereo views I'm familiar with were created by me from aerials I recovered at the Nat'l Archives. The process of creating them is straightforward but a bit of a drudge. The results are also very dependent on the quality of the aerials - in some, the 3-D effect jumps off the surface, others are harder to see. If you're interested in contemporary aerials there are services which can create the stereo images for almost any location. Viewing the aerials is tricky. Some processes require a special viewing mechanism somewhat like the old stereo viewers that were popular in the late 19th century.  I create a red/blue single image which when viewed with special red/blue glasses shows the 3-D stereo effect.

[Mark Bourgeois]

Routing and evolution of design -- actual changes not what "they" want you to believe.

You can't always know what an aerial can't tell you; distortions are hard to notice  yet fairly common. Calibrate to structure.

[Josh Stevens]

Hm, I still bear the scars from being  pilloried by this panel for daring to suggest Fishers Island didn't look all that great from the air.  I'm pleased now perhaps the comment is being understood.

[Mark Bourgeois]

Josh,

In my experience, the closer the course to big water, the weaker the correlation of actual quality to apparent quality as inferred by direct overhead aerials. (Obliques are different.)

From great heights, some of the world's greatest courses look like featureless, boring slogs. I would not judge a waterside course's quality from its aerial, unless you plan to play it from 10,000 feet.

[Thomas Dai]

An aerial can also tell you a bit about neighbouring properties, which might provide useful insights into all sorts of things.
atb

[Jeff_Brauer]

Semi OT, but I took that aerial photo interpretation class in college, as well.  The prof gave out the final exam on the first day, 10 questions, and told us they all came from the reading and we would answer two, to be picked by him.  Forced us to read everything, as it turns out some came from Suggested Reading List, not just the required reading list.

We would also take field trips to compare aerials to reality. On one photo, we noticed a white object in a river, which he thought was a water tank, but turned out to be something else, which seemed to shake him up the rest of the semester.  It came across as sort of the "photo is reality, reality is wrong" kind of mentality.

We did get to use a stereoscope, the machine that would allow you to draw the contour lines off the paired/offset aerial photos.  You could really see the topo and had to guide this sort of periscope thing around to draw them. What stood out was that if you missed a turn and were inadvertently off the ground plane, the little marker in your machine would seem to jump way off the screen as if flying, letting you know you were off base.  Those machines are probably in the Smithsonian now.

As to the original topic, from time to time I have learned stuff from aerials.  First, even with a bit of distortion, you can learn after the fact that you don't really hit the drive as far as you think you do.  I have measured drives of friends who claim to hit it 290, and its always more like 260.  And, for me, I know my old average 250-260 if I bust it, is now way, way down........

The other thing you can tell, sometimes, is if the architect relied mostly on plan, and was in reality designing for the airplane view.  The bunkers and greens have puzzle piece shapes that often look better from the air than the ground.

If I see a bunker that looks out of place or not shaped as well, I usually find there is a very site specific reason it is that way on the ground.  An example might be 10 at Shinny, with those short little fairway bunkers not 100 yards from the tee marking the saddle.

[Charlie_Bell]

Every winter a New England friend of mine looks forward to his annual long-drive competition with a group of golfing buddies.  They stand on the shore of a frozen lake and smash balls as far as they can across the icy surface. 


He says that Google Earth has been a great boon for computing distance. 

[Steve Lang]

   It can tell you a lot of golf is to be had.. and how to prepare or not for hazards

[John Connolly]

I have used historic aerials to discover facts about our home course that have been lost to antiquity. Its investigative and research attributes can be profound. One needn't pour through file cabinets looking for where a bunker was - just get the 1938 aerial - voila.