Birds' eye view urban photos

Where do you get them?

I am going to redo my Urban/Suburban movie using photos taken from a birds' eye view.

If anyone has suggestions about where to find great aerials, please suggest. I am looking for images which are shot from low-enough altutude that the site plan is clear. The photos don't need to be free and I'll give a copy of City Comforts for leads (which lead to fruition.)

UPDATE: Sorry. I don't mean directly-above aerials but shots from the side -- maybe a thousand feet up, at a 45 degree angle and a thousand feet away? -- so that the lay person can immediately grasp how the structure, site and right-of-way are related.

Comments

[joe o]

Google maps allows you to look at satelite photos for a given adress.

keyhole is a related commercial service that you may be able to buy pictures from.

[Laurence Aurbach]

Keyhole is awesome. It uses directly-above aerials, but distorts them to give a convincing illusion of flight. You can make movies from it too. NASA's World Wind is similar; it's open source, free, and more difficult to get into operation than Keyhole.

For professional photography, try Alex MacLean, or the "Earth From Above" guy, Yann Arthus-Bertrand.

Or, just hire a radio-controlled plane/helicopter to get exactly the shots you want.

[Josh]

Talk to your local film commission. I used to work for the one in Escambia County, FL, and we had a couple of thousand photos of our area hanging around (and, in our case, online). If the Seattle Office of Film and Video doesn't have a good library of aerial shots, they should certainly know a few local aerial photographers who have libraries for license.

[Al Z]

Not sure if this fits the bill, but here's an 8.5 meg shot of the Village of Cazenovia (Upstate New York); and there should be more in this collection...

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~springport/pictures116/11605.jpg

[Dinopello]

This guy has superb photo's of urban scenes, including some from high vantage. Link below goes directly to a Paris shot

http://www.asergeev.com/pictures/archives/compress/2002/287/04.htm

[Murph]

Every few years, my parents get a flyer attached to their doorknob from somebody offering to take a professional aerial photograph of their home, to frame and hang in their home. I've heard from other people that this isn't unique to my neck of the country. If you can track down one of these folks, you can probably get pictures of exactly the sites you want at exactly the angles you want.

[Jim Erkel]

Check out a well-stocked image bank maintained by the Metropolitan Design Center at the University of Minnesota at http://www.designcenter.umn.edu/imagebank/default.html.

[Jim Erkel]

Check out a well-stocked image bank maintained by the Metropolitan Design Center at the University of Minnesota at http://www.designcenter.umn.edu/imagebank/default.html.

[ian]

Check out docworld - via this flickr site:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/52614599@N00/

Its early days but there may be something you can use