Gobsmacking Satellite Photos Showcase Earth in All its Glory
An interview with Daily Overview founder Benjamin Grant
As drone photography has become commonplace, we have come to appreciate an entirely new perspective on our planet. Photos from above often reveal unexpected patterns and symmetries in our surroundings, but nowhere is this more evident than in satellite imagery.
Benjamin Grant has spent the past three years compiling the very best images from the archive of DigitalGlobe and compositing the images together to form larger panoramas of the planet. He stitches the huge vistas together, sometimes from as many as 25 individual images and publishes them on the Instagram feed of Daily Overview.
“I was inspired to start the project after I learned about the ‘Overview Effect,’” he says. “Coined by writer Frank White in 1987, the phrase speaks to the psychological shift that astronauts experience when they have an opportunity to look down and see the Earth as a whole. That vantage point inspires a new perspective of what it means to be alive, how everything that happens on the planet is connected, and how how we must work together to protect our planet. Later, when I realized I had the ability to compose and share these stunning Overview of our planet, the Overview Effect became the core mission (and source of the name) of the project and what I hoped to inspire for my audience.”
That vantage point inspires a new perspective of what it means to be alive, how everything that happens on the planet is connected, and how how we must work together to protect our planet.
Recently he’s published images of a public sauna located on the edge of the Baltic Sea, a flower bulb farm in the Netherlands, a glacial lake in southeast Iceland and sand dunes in Chad. All of them give a striking new perspective on the planet, perspectives that are near-impossible to gain from anything other than satellite imagery. His aim for the project is to increase awareness of the world’s beauty and therefore encourage people to conserve and protect it.
“You have an overwhelming sense of the time that would be required to create these staggering landscapes — erosion, build up of mountains — compared to what we’ve developed in the past 100 years,” Grant explains.
Some have confronted him over the nature of the project, pointing out that these photographs were not taken personally by Grant himself. “To those people I say that’s fine if you don’t want to consider me a photographer or an artist,” he says.
“Perhaps to them, I could just be a storyteller. Ultimately, the images that you see in the book do not look like this anywhere else, so I would have to say it’s undeniable that there has been some artistic or photographic process on my behalf. Also I have to assume that the people who deliver that criticism simply don’t understand what takes place during the composition process to stitch the images together to make the final Overviews possible.”
Grant’s process is certainly an intensive one. He needs to ensure that the images stitch together properly, check that colours match and remain seamless throughout the larger composite, then tweak the final resulting image in Lightroom before it’s ready to share.
“What’s fascinating about this medium — as compared to something like aerial photography from a helicopter — is that there is no recognizable top and bottom to each image,” Grant points out. “Therefore that’s give me the flexibility to rotate the image as I see fit until I find the alignment and cropping that I think is most alluring.”
Certainly, some of his images can appear almost otherworldly, so far outside of the scope of normal vision that they are jarring to look at.
After three years working on the project, Grant has now compiled some of his best images into a photography book, Overview. The chapters of the book follow themes, the construction of which Grant says came to him in a kind of thought experiment. “By that I mean I would start by considering the general themes that now constitute the first eight chapters of the book (agriculture, mining, energy, etc.) and then looked for new locations to capture within those ideas,” he explains. “For example, if I wanted to show an Overview related to energy, I could begin with a search for a list of solar panel facilities. Then I could inspect those locations through the satellite imagery, keeping in mind that I would only include a location in the book if it had a very strong visual appeal or a particularly fascinating story to tell.”
With Overview, Grant hopes to illuminate more of the world in an accessible way and to encourage people to conserve the unique, beautiful environments that his images portray. “I believe the Overview Effect is a powerful idea that needs to be shared and I think this book is the first time that it’s been packaged together with such a strong visual component and the research to back that up,” he says.
“Hopefully as the book finds itself in more people’s hands, people will approach these images with their own backgrounds and own experiences which will hopefully lead to even more collaboration and more opportunities to share them with the world.”
Overview is available to purchase here. You can learn more about Benjamin Grant and the Overview project on his website or on Instagram.
This article was first published on DigitalRev. You can follow us on Facebook orTwitter for more photography stories.