Digital Egypt Archives is a gallery of digital photographs by one photographer, Amargi Hillier, who loves Egypt. Hillier says on the web site, "I hope after viewing these photographs you will be inspired to visit Egypt and experience first hand the wonderment that cannot be experienced by photos."
All digital photographs on the website were taken with the Olympus D-600L DigitalVision camera, a high precision, award winning camera. They are available in jpeg format in full size and a quicker loading half size and have clear, slightly larger than usual thumbnail previews. You might prefer to look at the half size images first, since the full size photographs generally do not fit on a single screen.
The website is optimized for use with a 800 x 600 pixel screen size and looks fine on any size monitor. Although the pictures are digital they have not been retouched or enhanced with software.
Personal Around Cairo
In addition to the sites you would expect (the Pyramids, Sphinx) there
are sections on Garden City and Manial Palace on Roda island.
This is a strictly personal site, with many copyright warnings and pleas to help protect the rights of the photographer. Photos are for personal viewing online and not for sale. There are also a growing number of Real player sound files attached to the photographs. Future plans include adding the photographer's text commentary with each photograph and supporting maps and diagrams.
The site also offers a mailing list which informs you when new photos
are added or significant changes have been made to this site. As of this
review, there were 94 images on the site and continuing updates planned.
"TerraServer.com is dedicated to bringing complete coverage of the earth to market so that every one can see the world around them."
The TerraServer is an online source for overhead imagery with the largest online atlas of high-resolution satellite imagery and aerial photography available for free - and for sale - on the Internet.
From your web browser search, peruse and buy overhead images of just about anywhere in the world. Their archive already includes imagery from more than 60 countries, including Egypt. And they have plans to continue expanding until they have complete coverage of the earth’s surface.
It's fun to zoom in and out and dart around the planet. You can visit places you’ve never been or maybe get a new perspective on a place you see every day. Don't do a search for "Cairo" unless you want a list of the many towns in the States called Cairo! Rather search for "Egypt" or "Al Qahirah". http://terraserver.com/image.asp?S=14&T=100&X=0&Y=5&Z=1176&W=0 seems about the right place to start.
Ready to travel the speed of light? Browse through the listings available under the 'Famous Places' button, which fairly spans the globe. See Disney World, Hong Kong, or the Suez Canal.
The stuff for sale
You can purchase images and prints (provided by Kodak on Kodak Professional
photographic paper) of areas as small as one square mile. Images are provided
in either tiff or jpeg file format.
A Practical Partnership
TerraServer started as a joint research project between Aerial Images,
Inc., Microsoft, the U.S. geological Survey (USGS), and Compaq.
Aerial Images, Inc. wanted to sell imagery online and Microsoft was looking for a large database to demonstrate the capabilities of its new database software. Under the partnership formed, Microsoft built TerraServer and hosted the SPIN-2 imaged data for a limited time after its formal launch in June, 1998.
Since November, 1999 TerraServer.com, operating in the Research Triangle in North Carolina, has been hosting, displaying, and selling SPIN-2 imagery and adding more imagery from new providers (including ORBIMAGE and UK Perspectives).
Concurrently, the Redmond-based Encarta TerraServer site (http://terraserver.microsoft.com)
continues to host USGS imagery and is crosslinked to the Terraserver.com
site so searches on either site return identical results. Take a Trip!
