imran*

Flying back from Paris in June, I managed to shoot some lovely aerial photos of Leeds as we descended into Leeds-Bradford airport. One of the images – took me some time to identify,; eventually user annotations on Google Earth identified it as the St. Aidans opencast mine, flooded a few years ago when the River Aire burst its banks. Today, I received this surprising Flickr message:

Hi Imran,

I’ve just found your great aerial photo of St Aidans. I’m a lecturer in Mining and Leeds Uni, and used to work on St Aidan’s 20 years ago. Would you allow me to use your image for lectures at the, and also for a presentation I do for A-level Geology students? Full acknowledgement would be given.It would really help me to finish off the story of St Aidan’s.I look forward to hearing from you.

Many thanks,

Toby White
Leeds University
Dept. of Mining, Quarry and Mineral Engineering

Wow! I’ve no idea how Toby managed to find my photo, but I was happy to oblige him. Though I guess, as a former worker at the mine and a lecturer in mining – it’s was probably inevitably serendipitous 🙂

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I can’t wait for the day, Flickr starts to integrate geotagging – it’s just too much of a hassle at the moment. Really, what we need are smarter cameras that can write geotags into the EXIF portion of photos. Cameraphones have the neccessary technology already, but carriers are notoriously protective of their locative data 🙁