Now I’m not promoting anything, I’m not affiliated with, member of, or tied to it in any way other than a casual looker, and I won’t link the address, as I don’t want Vinnie starting off a Friday in a bad mood, but there is kind of a cool web site out there that offers a zillion photos, from all over the country, from the 50’s on.
Their main selling point was aerial farm pictures. They would buzz around different parts of the country, taking pictures of farms and residences, and then a salesman would show up at your door with samples, some of then rendered in color, and try and sell you an aerial picture of your farm or home.
They also did small towns, and rural communities. For any history buffs out there, they are worth a look. You can look at a small print of everything they, loaded with water marks, but still cool.
Just search for a site that might offer something like, uhmmm…vintage aerial.
Also the Hagely Museum and Library has the Dallin Aerial Survey Co. archives digitized. They did mostly industrial customers, mostly on the East Coast.
Yes, it’s a great resource for modelers. I’ve followed them from their early days and remember they commented that model railroaders and railfans were a big part of their customer base which surprised them.
i too have used historic aerials for research for a number of years. Truly a great site with many mid-century dates. But I see potential in vintage aerials as well. I was looking at flights along the Alexander County Rairoad, and they had some great shots of railside industries and businesses. Those 3D views could come in handy for modeling structures that may no longer exist.
I understand. They do have some from the 50’s, quite a few, as when my granddad’s farm was done. I remember when he got the picture. At that time, as a kid of about 7, ( which was 1956) it was the coolest picture I had ever seen of the farm.
Later on they added photos from the 80’s, but all of the first series was in the 50’s and 60’s.
They had commercial artist “colorize” the main picture, which was one of their selling points. It just looked neat to me.
My main gripe with Historic Aerials is their ‘pay-to-see watermark free’ maps buisness model. If Google ever decided to include a ‘historic images’ function into Google Maps it would kill Historic Aerials in a heartbeat.
But despite the watermarks… I have to be honest in saying I do use Historic Aerials a lot. They have a pretty good coverage, and I have been able to use it in conjunction with other resources to pinpoint certain changes in my local railroad history (for example, Historic Aerials confirms the construction of a train station on the Western Pacific Warner Branch during WWII to serve the local army base).
I am looking at buying some images off of Historic Aerials and I’m not sure what to order for gathering prototype information. They offer three different pixel sizes and three different file types:
1800
3600
7200
JPG ; PNG; GeoTiff
JPG and PNG are $10 ; $30 ; $90 for the various sizes and Tiff files double that.
What are the tradeoffs of these files and sizes? I know pixel size generally means better resolution as they increase but does it matter that much on an overhead shot? Anyone actually tried difference resolutions or file sizes?