A few years ago, I tried to capture the enormity of new open-cast mines in a small village in Georgia. From the top of the spoil-heap, 'the pyramids', as some local elderly ladies at a bus stop called them, I looked down and across at a house whose garden gate opened out into a vertical drop of bare soil. Some 30 metres below, the hole of black manganese bottomed out. This, the ladies told me, had appeared on their common grazing land a couple of days earlier and the sheer size was totally overwhelming and even a fisheye lens couldn't communicate all of it at once, while no other crop could show anything fully for scale.

Take this boathouse, for example. In the middle of woodland and covered in trees, there is rarely a clear line to photograph. It is entirely camouflaged and only given away in its three-dimensional form, unless we keep to close-ups of bricks, torn by the twisting roots of trees. Old men recall taking a boat out on this lake as children in the 1960s, around the time the wooden superstructure was removed and rebuilt as a garden shed in the nearby village.

Instead, with photogrammetry, we can slice through the excess tree trunks and reveal the contours, the shape of the old walls and even take measurements. The viewer can now also take some agency in exploring the scene, or a photographer to show something from an angle that is impossible to access in reality. All this enables new stories to be shared and communicated much more engagingly and memorably than with a simple 2D image.

The boathouse in 1921, seen here on the mid-left of frame. In the animated model above, the view is from this same direction but elevated slightly.