Ken VanBree
I received my first camera, a Kodak Brownie instamatic, when I was in 7th grade. Our family was going on a camping trip from Michigan to Yellowstone National Park and my parents wanted me to have a camera of my own to use during the trip. My father was a teacher by profession but he loved to take pictures. He and his sister had driven from Michigan to California and back in 1928 in a Model T Ford. I still have some of the photographs he took on that trip.
I have always enjoyed photography as a hobby. I have done wedding photography, nature photography and commercial photography for fun and profit during the years that I worked as an engineer and a manager at high-tech companies in Silicon Valley. More than a decade ago I spent a year at MITOs Sloan School of Management studying technology innovation and its role in new product development. During my year at MIT it became clear to me that photography would transition from film to digital imaging.
When I returned to the San Francisco Bay area from MIT in 1995 I resumed my work in designing software and hardware for High Tech companies. I worked on a number of advanced imaging and communications products. I continued my interest in photography but sold my darkroom in order to buy a copy of Adobe Photoshop.
We built a new home in the Bay Area in 1998 and my wife bought me one of the first affordable digital cameras to document the process. I took hundreds of images of our home under construction with the thought of using those images for long term maintenance of the house. I was systematic in the way I took and stored pictures but as I accumulated more and more images I found it more difficult to locate an individual image among the hundreds of images I had taken. Eventually I build a simple software interface to allow me to easily view the construction images.
Several years after we moved into our new home we decided to add some in-wall speakers to our home entertainment system. The company that had done the initial installation had taken pictures of additional wires they had run in the walls for future expansion. Unfortunately they had lost the pictures they had taken, so we had to rely on the images I had taken during construction in order to complete the job.
My experience with the in-wall speakers and several other maintenance tasks around the house convinced me that there was value in having well-organized easily-accessible images of a home under construction. I talked with several architects and builders that I knew and found support for the idea of providing a construction photography service. In 2003 I decided to leave my job in high-tech and pursue my dream of combining my love of technology with my love of photography.
I founded Imaging Perspective, LLC in November of 2003 with several engineers I had worked with in other settings. We have continued to develop and deliver easily-accessible as-built visual and thermal images of construction projects. Our thru-view technology provides X-Ray views of every interior wall. We have developed techniques for finding a class of latent construction defects that continue to plague the construction industry. Our software provides a consistent interface for organizing and viewing construction images on the web, on CD-ROM or on your desktop. To see our viewer in action on recent projects that we have done visit our website at imagingperspective.com
Ken VanBree is the owner of Imaging Perspective, a Bay Area firm that specializes in as-built construction photography. Questions or comments are welcome to ken@imagingperspective.com
The Imaging Perspective: Why Construction Photography
by Ken VanBree
