"A picture used to be worth a thousand words. Of course, that was before GIS technology, 3-D imaging, airborne laser scanning and other advances were counted into the equation.
Digital mapping services in particular are using today's faster and smarter technology to pack more information than ever into their imagery, and for Mike Ritchie, president of the Lexington-based firm Photo Science, the sky is literally the limit.
From homeland security concerns to natural disaster responses, a first step in any planning initiative is understanding the lay of the land, and when it comes to information gathering, the view from above keeps getting better.
Photo Science specializes in geospatial solutions, including aerial photography and digital mapping services for federal, state and local governments as well as utility companies and engineering firms.
Since Ritchie, a UK civil engineering graduate who grew up in the Bardstown area, purchased the company in 1991, Photo Science has grown from roughly 15 employees in Lexington to 188 employees in eight offices across seven states. Ritchie estimates that the company's gross billings, which were roughly $1 million in 1991, will grow to an estimated $30 million this year, with approximately 96 percent of that revenue coming from repeat clients.
Some of those repeat clients, including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Department of Defense, have turned to Photo Science's expertise for significant assignments. In one recently declassified project, the company helped the U.S. military to build a quick preliminary model of Baghdad prior to the first U.S. invasion under Project Iraqi Freedom, creating a color-coded model to show troops what were projected to be safe and unsafe corridors at that time. Photo Science won a national award from the American Council of Engineering Companies for helping to develop inland electronic navigation charts for use on crucial commercial waterways like the Mississippi River. Photo Science has also played a role in hurricane recovery efforts, having been called upon to map the entire southern quarter of Louisiana for the U.S. Geological Survey after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and conducting similar missions in the South for the Army Corps of Engineers after Hurricane Wilma as well.
"Our philosophy is we like to get with clients that are going to stick with us, and we'll stick with them," Ritchie said.
One part of maintaining those client relationships is applying new technology, which allows Photo Science to provide better, more accurate data on a continual basis for clients with fixed budgets, Ritchie said.
"A lot of companies out there are still using a lot of the technology that we had in '91, '92 and '93, but we have jumped full-speed into the latest and greatest. We try to stay off the bleeding edge, but we find ourselves bleeding a lot sometimes," Ritchie said.
But the effort to drive down unit costs while staying on top of the newest advances creates challenges of its own. For one thing, the equipment isn't cheap.
"Some of the cheapest things that we own are the airplanes that we fly around in," said Mark Meade, Photo Science vice president, referring to Photo Science's nine aircraft, eight of which are based out of Blue Grass Airport. The planes are used to tote the company's two $1.5 million digital cameras and two LIDAR systems, which carry a price tag of $1.1 million each, Meade said. The LIDAR systems, which bounce lasers off the earth from an airplane to measure individual elevation points, can register 150,000 separate elevation measurements to an accuracy of three inches in roughly a second, collecting as much data in six seconds as a person could gather in 18 months from photography.
In addition, the learning curve on some technology and less-than-perfect software systems can also be formidable, requiring substantial debugging in addition to training and finetuning to fit client needs on deadline.
"Newer technology is not plug and play," Ritchie said. "It's not like buying a piece of Microsoft software off the shelf when a new release comes out."
While technology has opened new applications in recent years, the majority of the company's growth comes through the growth and expansion of its individual clients, Ritchie said.
The company's client mix is roughly 30 percent federal government, 35 percent utilities, 25 percent state and local government, and 10 percent other engineering firms. Photo Science also handles small projects, such as mapping the development in recent years at Hamburg Pavilion.
But as efforts like Google Earth and Microsoft's Virtual Earth bring more attention to the potential commercial applications of aerial imagery, Ritchie expects the growing technological capabilities of his company to be called into use for a whole new world of mapping, planning and decision-making needs in coming years.
"What is the universal language of the world? It's imagery," Ritchie said. "Everyone reads and understands imagery. We've made it so much more affordable now, that we've got navigation systems in our automobiles.
"With that comes using this new technology to better map all the resources of our nation," he continued. "What about our water systems, our pipelines, our power plants? All of the sudden, they are going to have to be mapped to a new level and secured to a new level, using technology that can now make that affordable," Ritchie said.
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