As you stated: "They merely serve different purposes".

By no means was I attempting to denigrate other types of aerial photography,
as most of it is of at least some use, even if you just want to see what
your house looks like from the air.

But we were discussing aerial photography in the context of it's national
security implications.

I am not familiar with the type of aerial photography you describe, but I
recognize that most any type of photography might be useful to someone
contemplating an attack of some sort.

I used the "scaled" aerial photography as the subject of my discussion for
two reasons:

1. It's a subject I know something about.

2. If someone were contemplating an attack on a facility occupying a large
area, such as a military installation or nuclear facility, a scaled aerial
photo would be an almost essential tool.

I intended no slight against your profession, and I apologize if it appeared
I did. I was simply addressing what I considered to be an area of aerial
photography that might be the most useful to a terrorist, and an area of
which I had some knowledge.



"Rosspilot" wrote in message
...
There is a big difference between "aerial photography" and someone who
simply takes along a digital camera to shoot a few "purty pitures".

I agree so far . . . but then there's this:



I used to work in land surveying and civil engineering, so I frequently
worked with aerial photographs. For those of you who haven't seen one,
these
are typically large (24" x 36" being the norm) photographs, with very
high
resolution. And they are incredibly well "scaled". Assume a surveyor on
the
ground measures the distance between two points as 2000'; if you use a
scale
(ruler) to measure the distance on an aerial photograph, it will usually
be
correct within 5 - 10 feet.

These types of aerial photographs are generally "tied" back to some sort
of
"marker" with published lat/long coordinates. Give me a couple of good
aerial photos and a scale, and I can give you the GPS coordinates to drop
a
bomb right down somebody's chimney.


This is "mapping" or "survey". It is a very specific type of aerial
photography, but by no means the only "useful" type.



Sure, they'd go out and shoot an overhead
picture of your house, store, whatever, but it would usually be just
that,
an overhead picture, not to scale, and not useful for much except
recording
the ground features.




I must take issue with this, Bill.

Oblique cosmetic aerial photography serves myriad
professionally-recognized necessary and useful purposes. I do this work
for
some of the world's largest commercial realtors,
engineers, developers, and government agencies.

Vertical, scaled "sterile" aerial imagery is valuable and serves it's
purpose.
So does oblique low-level. They are not mutually exclusive, and neither
is
better than they other. They merely serve different purposes.


www.Rosspilot.com