Skatespot Documentation

I have been documenting skatespots by photography for a long time. By using Structure-from-Motion/Multi-View Stereo to create 3D point clouds from a set of photographs, I'm exploring the zone between 2D- and 3D display and how this changes my perception of the skatespots.

Skatespots are very likely to vanish sometime. May it be because they get closed using constructional elements like skatestoppers or they get torn down completely because they don’t fit in the plans of city development. Or they just get out-dated and need a re-construction.

For a long time I have dealt with the photographic documentation of Skatespots and I’m always on the search to capture the entirety of such spots. This includes the skatespot with all its various geometric objects, transitions, gradients and edges, the roughness of the floor, the cracks and ripples - as well as its surrounding and how it is embedded in urban space. All these aspects together create the feeling a skateboarder has when exploring the site.

I started to use SFM/MVS to create 3D point clouds from multiple photographs capturing different views of an object. Using these 3D point clouds it is possible to capture a skatespot in its entirety using photographic means, that’s very exciting. New development in Software and Hardware enable the usage of SFM/MVS methods with an appealing quality and at reasonable cost.

The Colmap software and the availability of GPU processing power at reasonable price made it possible for me to use SFM/MVS for the skatespot reconstructions.

Visual Documentation