Just bringing this back to the top for those who missed the
killer pictorial I posted Friday evening near the top of this
page (scroll up). Do that first before reading on, so you don't forget!
John F,
I generally did the aerials in two stages (not always). First
was "hunting and gathering". Hunting was either via
golfcourse.com to get the mapquest.com color aerial (wasn't
always that easy, as mq.com had bugs in it, where the aerial
photo button didn't always pop up) or to Terraserver for the
B&W version (mq.com has/had terraserver's B&W photos in
many areas where they don't have color coverage, but
Terraserver's are easier to deal with and put together.
Then it would be gathering, scrolling over the courses to get
all of it. That wasn't always easy, with multiple course
complexes or neighboring courses, knowing which course was
which. A number of times, I'd need to consult
golfcourse.com's course scorecards (if available) to figure out
the right course.
There is actually more to it (problems/bugs, etc) than this,
but that's the gist of it.
I would usually gather several courses at a time.
Then I would piece togehter several at a time, which involved
simple MS Paint, and taking out mulitple logos to leave 1 or 2
on the entire thing. Resizing blank photos to get general
dimensions of the final pic, carefully piecing them together,
with less-than-surgeon-like steadiness, not always easy.
Some were pieced together by up to 11 or 12 different pics.
One or two of the early ones were only one pic (zoomed in
aerials weren't available then), so no piecing together was
required (Seminole was one of these - one pic - but small,
obviously).
Some (after zoomed-in ones were available) would take as
little as 15 minutes to gather and put together, some would
take up to 45 minutes, perhaps. After doing it awhile, I
learned how to streamline and do it faster.
Another story is how I determined what courses to do - and in what order. Perhaps another time.