composite Archives

If you’ve ever wondered what London, Ontario looked like from above in 1965, well you can wonder no more.

Similar to the composite of 1922 London aerial photos I stitched together in 2013, this one is made up of 21-or-so aerial photos taken in 1965 by Hunting Survey Corp. The photos currently reside at the Map and Data Centre in Western Libraries at Western University.

Some of the streets may not line up perfectly, as I used Autopano to automatically stitch the separate images together (it did a great job though!)

The view you see here is all that the surveying covered. Some areas of the city missing include Clarke Road, and areas around the 401, among some others.

Below is a zoomable version of the composite. You can find a larger zoomable version here.

Click here to view in a new window.

Came across a large cache of aerial photography of London, Ontario via Western Libraries yesterday. The one set that stood out for me were the ones from 1922 (the earliest ones they had.) They were photographed at an approx ratio of 1:3,200, so they were fairly low to the ground and captured quite a bit of detail. Being the kind of person I am (one who wastes a lot of time doing silly stuff like this..) I decided to try to stitch them together to create a large composite. Problem was, the individual photos were plagued with light leaks and dark corners, so it was fairly tricky.

The photos may not line up completely, but I tried my best to keep the city blocks looking proper as they are in the individual frames.

I plan on adding to it (there are quite a few more stretching as far as Huron to the north, Wonderland to the west, Clarke Road to the east, and Commissioners/Gore Road to the south.

Here’s the Central London portion.

Click for larger version

View on Google Earth (KMZ)

UPDATE: March 29, 2015 — Embedded below is a Zoomify version of the above photo.

Click here for a bigger view.

Tag: composite

Zoomify: London, Ontario in 1965

Central London, 1922