How to take pictures for photomosaics in narrow conditions: A clever solution for a common archaeological fieldwork problem.

Everyone who works on archaeological excavations knows situations like this:

A narrow and deep trench or a wall near to the limit of the excavation area.

If subsequently we have to make a photomosaic of the profile or facade, it means:

• either photographing from the top, hazarding the consequences like distorsion:
  
  
  
• or splitting the photomosaik in numerous single tiles, and that means a lot of work!
  

A very simple and clever solution for this problem can be the use of a mirror:

Putting it down in an inclined position on the ground and positioning yourself on the opposite side (watch the illustration beneath and heed me kneeing outside of the trench), it allows you to take a shot of the reflection of your facade in the mirror.

Of course the picture will show the object mirror-inverted, but don't worry:
The rectification software will fix it again...

Thanks a lot to Granma for borrowing us her wonderful kitsch bedroom-mirror!

Happy birthday ATOR! Two years of Open Research

The 27th of July is the "birthday" of ATOR and like last year in this day I would like to share some statistics about the progress of this experiment.

In one year, the number of active authors has increased from 6 to 13, while the posts reached the quote of 160 (79 last year). The reactions of the community led to 271 comments (96 of which were written in 2012). Currently (19:16 pm) the number of visualizations is 109447 (48899 visits since the activation of the Revolver Maps plugin) and we have 37 new members which, added to the 25 persons of 2012, bring the total number to 61 people.

As you see in the image below the main celebration for 2013 is the achievement of 100000 visits.

This short post is intended as a thanks for all the people composing the community of ATOR, readers and authors as well. 

Thank you for your posts, feedbacks and support! 

Your help was very important in improving and speeding up the research presented in this blog. Thanks to you we reached results which, initially, were not foreseen and in some cases ATOR gave birth to new methodologies that have become rapidly very popular in the scientific community . 

We hope to keep this trend also in the next year and to maintain an high quality level in the field of Open Research!