Aerial photography is used today as a source to collect a wide variety of information, including the location of transportation routes, streams, lakes, and the outlines of buildings and farm fields. On a computer, digital aerial images are displayed in 9-1-1 response centers to pinpoint the location of emergency callers that use mobile phones, and in police cars and fire trucks to analyze emergency situations.
Although both maps and aerial photos present a "bird's-eye" view of the earth, aerial photographs are NOT maps since they have a high degree of distortion and do not have a constant scale across the image. "Orthophotographs" are aerial photographs that have been corrected for these distortions, and therefore have the same properties of a map.
For finding aerial imagery, visit our catalog of aerial photography or our online resource listing.
Season & film type
It's important to know the month or season of the photography for determining whether the photography is
"leaf-on" (deciduous vegetation with leaves) or "leaf-off". To acquire leaf-off
photography, the window of opportunity to fly and capture the photography is rather small which usually
happens in early Spring.
Typically black-and-white film costs less than color film. Depending on the area of coverage, this can be
a costly factor to consider. Listed are types of film used for photography:
B&W = Back-and-White (panchromatic)
B&W IR = Black-and-White Infrared
COLOR = Natural Color
COLOR IR = Color Infrared (false color)
Infrared film is typically used to view differences between types of vegetation and to clearly see the distinction between water and land.