SitesandPhotos.com, the world’s only photo and video bank devoted entirely to archaeology, has teamed up with Albatross Aerial Photography to add aerial photos and video to their already comprehensive library – with Malta being one of its next projects.
SitesandPhotos.com was started by Shmuel Magal, a certified archaeologist specialising in Classical and Marine Archaeology, who wanted to preserve the world’s archaeological sites through photos and videos. As a student Mr Magal came to realise how little photographic and video documentation was available for archaeological sites.
Currently Sitesand Photos.com offers 180,000 archaeological photos and 6,400 video for sites from around the Mediterranean including Greece, Israel, Turkey, and Italy. With the addition of Albatross they now offer aerial photos and videos of Greece, Israel and Malta. The two companies will now work together on future projects bringing both their archaeological and aerial expertise to expand the ever growing media bank.
Sitesandphotos.com already has a databank of some 1,468 images of Maltese sites, but none from the air as yet, Mr Magal said: “When I started archiving archaeological sites I wanted to save them as records for the generations to come because many of the sites were quickly becoming destroyed. Teaming up with Albatross seemed like the natural way to improve our services. By adding aerial photos we can document entire sites, which is very important to us because erosion and urban sprawl are rapidly destroying many of the world’s archaeological treasures.”
Albatross was established in 1988 by two former Israel Air Force helicopter pilots – Duby Tal and Moni Haramati. Albatross has published several books and has had its images printed in many major newspapers and magazines, such as Discovery and National Geographic. Mr. Tal spoke highly of the new partnership, “We are very excited to add our pictures to the SitesandPhotos.com archaeological photo archive. We are also very eager to start working on new projects and take SitesandPhotos.com airborne.”
Sites and Photos is a stock media and subscription company specializing in archaeology and ancient art. The company is committed to providing scholars, publishers and advertisers the most detailed, updated and scientifically accurate evidence of life from all historical periods and all incidents of human civilization around the world.
Sites and Photos was founded in 2007 as a joint venture of two Israeli companies - Albatross Aerial Photography Ltd (established 1988) and Reut Sites and Photos Ltd (established 2005).