Sergio Aguayo, senior photogrammetrist at Aurora’s Merrick & Co., recently won first place in the International LiDAR Mapping Forum (ILMF) “LiDAR as Art” contest, announced by GeoDigital International. The awards program, recently established, held its first competition at the end of 2011. Contestants were required to take airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) images and create art from the data.

Courtesy of Merrick & Co.

Aguayos inspiration for the picture came from imagining driving on a road under a dramatic night sky with a light source illuminating his way home.

Aguayo’s submittal entitled “Lighting Up the Night” consists of five images captured from a testing site in Utah. After reviewing the images, Aguayo’s inspiration came from imagining driving on a road under a dramatic night sky with a light source illuminating his way home. He added birds to create depth and reality to the image. In order to keep the visual impact of the image, Aguayo kept the LiDAR points visible.

As a prize, Aguayo was awarded an iPad from GeoDigital International as well as $1,000 to donate to a charity of his choice. He chose to contribute to the Overland High School soccer program, located in Aurora. In addition, Aguayo’s work was showcased at the ILMF 2012 conference and will be highlighted in promotional materials for the 2013 ILMF conference.

At Merrick for more than 10 years, Aguayo supports the photogrammetric and LiDAR disciplines at the firm. His responsibility includes the compilation of maps in different scales, and he has extensive experience on softcopy photogrammetric workstations, as well as many types of mapping software.

Merrick uses the most-advanced LiDAR sensors on the market today. The company has embraced the technology since 1997 and provided highly technical and definitive services to clients for a variety of applications.