Wednesday 2 October 2013

Pano processing & description researching

Today I processed a few panos.

In the evening I was trying to write a description for one of them, but it was very tricky. Included in the panorama was a church building, so I wanted to try and get some information on the building for the description. Getting the name of the Church was very easy as it was on Google Earth. But the Church's website didn't have any information on the building.

Googling didn't bring up much either. I did find this page, which gives some information about the Church: Canmore: Edinburgh, Johnston Terrace, St Columba's Free Church of Scotland. But then I found this page on Wikipedia: St Columba's-by-the-Castle. This is a different Church, but is located on the same road, and is dedicated to the same Saint. The Wikipedia article for St Columba's-by-the-Castle gives the same architect name (John Henderson) as the Canmore article on St Columba's Free Church, and the construction dates are nearly the same on both articles as well.

Furthermore, the Canmore article lists under books and references Kemp, E N [et al.] (1953) The Church of St Columba-by-the-Castle, Edinburgh: a note on its history and its place in the liturgical movement today. So that made me wonder whether the Canmore article was actually about the Church of St Columba-by-the-Castle, and they'd just titled it wrong. (An easy mistake given the same name of both Churches and how close together they are).

After a lot more researching I found this page: Photo of St Columba's Free Church under construction. While the photo description and comments don't give details of the architect, they do corroborate the other information given on the Canmore article. Some of the comments also mention the St Columba's-by-the-Castle church, so it's not people being confused between the two churches either.

On an unrelated note, Google Maps seems to have changed their imagery at high zoom levels now, to use images shot by a plane or balloon. This gives a view of more of the faces of buildings than the satellite view, which is more just the tops of buildings.

I prefer the satellite view, plus Streetview to see building faces when needed. But I guess that this new view probably only takes over when the satellite view isn't available in high enough resolution.

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