By golly, it sure was nice chatting with Steven Feldman for the Geomob podcast about the thin veil between art and cartography, stealing opportunities for accidental professional development, and brewing fun into the map-making process. I think I could have continued chatting with Steven well into his evening but he wisely capped it at a … Continue reading Geomob Podcast with Steven Feldman
Just because your map is in the Netherlands, doesn’t mean you can’t brew some terrain hillshade into it! I’m from the glacially-scraped flatlands of Michigan, trust me, I know flat. But I also know that a bit (or a lot) of terrain hillshade on a map can bring it to life. So what can be … Continue reading How to Force Terrain for Maps of Very Flat Areas
This is an 8 foot (aka 2.4 meters or 244 centimeters…why doesn’t anyone use decimeters? decimeters are underused) diameter globe that glows and slowly spins in a building on the campus of Esri. If you want to learn about it’s ideation, creation, inflation, and installation, check out this conflagration of information. Celestial When I was a … Continue reading Big globe, Small World
Perhaps as important as fire to the USA Wildfires map, created by Jinnan Zhang and me, is the smoke forecast layer. Fire is a punctuated risk, but the resulting smoke is a far-flung and pervasive risk. The National Weather Service smoke forecast layer is a helpful resource for understanding the current, and projected, concentrations of airborne particulates. Recent improvements … Continue reading Smoke Forecast Timeline added to the USA Wildfires Map
Here is a map of the Great Rift Valley, in Ethiopia. It is very much a 2D map. Sort of. Absolutely. In a sense. It uses the Plan Oblique tool, available in the glorious set of Terrain Tools for ArcGIS Pro, released by Ken Field some time back. Developed by Bernie Jenny and Bojan Šavrič, based on some beautiful hand-wrought oblique … Continue reading How to Make this Map of the Rift Valley
This is the audio from a podcast interview where I got to chat with MiCAMP’s Michael Cousins and Nathan Fazer. We talk about school and work and motivation and creativity and the ups and downs of it all. It was fun chatting with these fellow Michiganders. It’s over an hour long so if I see … Continue reading Podcast Interview with MiCAMP’s Michael Cousins and Nathan Fazer
In geography, an antipode is the exact other side of the world from any given location. When I was a kid, we always used to talk about digging a hole so deep that you’d exit in China. But we foolish Michigan kids didn’t realize that if we really dug a hole straight down, presuming we survived the … Continue reading Turn Your World Inside-Out with Antipodes
This map was made for the lovely folks at Conservation International, to help with an ongoing project regarding stewardship of undersea environments and ecosystems. It is the second in a series, the first being the Salas y Gómez and Nazca undersea ridges. Here’s a how-to video series for that first map, and technique in general. … Continue reading The Emperor Seamounts
Here’s how you can apply a dynamic tinting to vintage black and white hillshade images to create a retro-vibe hand-tinted antique photo sort of aesthetic. Also there is just something lovely about georeferencing the terrain art of cartographers of the past. If you want to skip to the action, jump to 3:10. It’s a “luminosity” … Continue reading Colorize Vintage Black and White Hillshade Maps
This is the map that introduces chapter 4 of GIS for Science Volume 3. It uses modern forest density data from the US Forest Service to give 3D elevation to an 1883 map of the same thing. Trippy. It was a fast and fun collaboration with Chris Oswalt and Hobie Perry of the Forest Service and … Continue reading Make a Vintage Forestry Map 3D With Modern Forestry Data
Adventures In Mapping 