One of the things I experimented with last year was adding lines and annotations to photographs to be able to show some attorneys in another state what the conditions on the ground really looked like. I prepared a map, of course, but thought that the annotated photos were much more bang for the buck. The client liked them as well, so that made two of us.
The basic task was to determine the location of a 30 ft. wide strip of land subject to an easement for ingress and egress connecting a public road with a tract of land without road frontage and to describe the conditions that prevented the use of the strip in its present condition for such access.
Here are a few of the photos from that project.
The beginning of the easement at the public road
The white PVC irrigation pipe stakes were set out along the easement lines and then lines were drawn between them in MSPaint.
and, finally, my particular favorite of the series:
MY FAVORITE AS WELL
I will say that those guy wires coming off the poles of the shed to anchor stakes driven into the ground are the sort of Rube Goldberg solution that a person might want to use if he or she wanted to obstruct the last ten feet of the width of the easement as much as possible. Otherwise, it would have been much easier to brace the poles diagonally inside the shed.
Been there, done that. A picture is indeed worth a 1000 words!
great idea for showing the reality of a situation.
you stated, "The white PVC irrigation pipe stakes were set out along the easement lines and then lines were drawn between them in MSPaint." was it all done w/ MSPaint or did you use another program for the text?
Are the guy wires "bracing the poles" or is the shed open toward the prevailing wind direction and they are an attempt to keep the shed from making like a "tumbling tumbleweed" and heading for the next county?
> Are the guy wires "bracing the poles" or is the shed open toward the prevailing wind direction and they are an attempt to keep the shed from making like a "tumbling tumbleweed" and heading for the next county?
Well, structurally speaking, is there a difference? Diagonal wires between the poles inside the shed would accomplish the same thing. :>
If I wanted to build a fence based on your photographs and yellow lines, would I use the edge of the yellow line or the center?
> was it all done w/ MSPaint or did you use another program for the text?
Actually, I did use another program, the PaperPort software that came with my Xerox Documate 510 Scanner, to add the text and arrows. I imagine that Photoshop has a similar capability or better.
> If I wanted to build a fence based on your photographs and yellow lines, would I use the edge of the yellow line or the center?
If you are in Wisconsin, Richard Schaut has assured me that you would build the fence anywhere but the record boundary. Then, don't you just tell the adjoining owner onto whose land your fence overlaps that "the record is faulty and must be corrected?" :>
I like it.
Very slick McMillimeter!
Cool. How are you putting the lines on the photos?
> Cool. How are you putting the lines on the photos?
MSPaint has the tools to do that. One trick in the case where you want the line to disappear behind an object like that sheep's foot roller in the bottom photo is to draw a thin guide line picking an inconspicuous color from the photo and then tracing parts of it with a wider line in a vivid color.
I like to make pictures part of my drawings. So I use the draw.raster image to import my jpg file into the drawing and then use CAD to edit the picture with text, etc....
Using this method I can place the photo in the drawing to show the direction of the view.
That's a good idea.
I had a similar easement case.
I didn't draw anything on the photos; I just testified as to what they show on the stand. But there is a road in the photos so I could use the laser pointer to show the easement lines.
> I had a similar easement case.
Yes, for court, it would be a good idea to print two sets, one with the lines and annotations drawn on and one without. If you run them as a slideshow, it's pretty cool to see the lines just appear on the same image.
Concerning the first photo, it appears to be a good example showing how a boundary line is on one side of some posts and on the other side of others.
I would say that this should be something of great concern for fence line surveyors. It would cause a simple description to be expanded into a metes and bounds from one fence post to the next.
:-/
Well, the yellow line is only 0.04 wide.
Very nice, thanks for sharing.
The court room has an overhead projector that doesn't require transparencies. I gave the attorney letter sized copies of the exhibits and he projected them up onto the wall. That was much easier than bringing big exhibits pasted onto foam core.
