I already have all the pix I need of my house. And neighborhood. And county – zoomable, selectable by address, tax ID #, or owner’s name. In color, with optional overlays of town boundaries, school districts, wetlands, etc., and all online free. It’s better than Terraserver:
You fool! Your house was built on Indian burial grounds and he was trying to show you!
They’re here.
FYI to other dopers, the link hosed my internet connection badly. Everything froze. I couldn’t even make XP kill the browser. I had to reboot. I’m on a dial-up using firefox.
Done it for my self, done it for friends. Seen a lot of GREAT photos of farms and stuff and such bought over the years by relatives and places I have been. Never hard a complaint. Not all are over priced.
You are giving all aerial photography a bad name with these comments.
If a guy like me had not done an Arial survey of the land your subdivision was on so the engineering firm doing the plans had the proper info to take to the planning and zoning commission, your house would never have gotten built, if you are in a subdivision. Not manny guys try to sell to this type of place. Subdivisions are ugly and the people in them all had ‘tudes’ ( see, I can paint with a wide brush too )
Most here do not have the faintest idea between an vertical shot and a good oblique shot with a big format camera done of a very nice house and grounds out in the yuppie part of the area.
Most little guys don’t take pictures of tree hidden places, be stupid to think you could sell one to the owner. You take pics of places you can get to without burning $$$$$ in fuel and of places that look like they might would like a pretty aerial shot from an angle showing the place.
The guy in the OP did not do that or apparently the poster would not ever buy anything… ::: shrug ::: Pretty place ort not and judging from the post, his place would look like his attitude.
There hangs on the wall of where I used to work some pictures of the NY skyline and the Statue of Liberty that I took pre 9-11 while flying a Cessna - 310 using a mapping camera that uses 9 inch wide film and had a moving platen to take out the image motion. ( $300,000.00 camera back in the late 80’s. )Threw the plane into some fun banks getting those color shots out through the belly. It is a mapping camera, not usually used for pretty shots of houses although I did all the time. Can do some amazing things with a negative that is 9 inches square )
They have turned down many thousands of dollars offers for copies of those shots.
Until you see some good shots of a place, you have no idea how good they can be.
Try to hire a pro with a good large format camera to get a top quality picture of your house. $$$$$
::: shrug ::: Different stroke for different folks but to vilify all aerial photos as the work of telemeters and call them slime is way beyond the pale IMO.
YMMV
They were selling aerial photos way before satellites were in the sky. The photos are not straight overhead either. They were sold to people before they took the photos in B&W panoramic style. The sales men would note the color of the buildings and major objects. They would hand color the picture before deliver, and it included the fields with crops. It was a bragging photo to show off to visitors.
Another little farm fact about bragging rights. A certain manufacturer would give out a metal sign that went on top of a silo after it was paid for in full. They could drive by and see how good the farmer was doing. “Look he has five silos paid off.”
He’s serious - don’t click on this link if you have Firefox.
-neuroman, who clicked.
Well, I’ve hired a professional photographer to take an aerial shot of our property, I’ve taken aerial shots myself, and we’ve purchased the ones peddled to us by itinerant aviators. In the last case, the shot was quite a nice one showing our home in a way the others didn’t. For the price he was asking, it was a bargain to us.
Caveat Emptor.
We bought one. Nice picture. A bit expensive but not something I could have done myself. There is Mrs G standing in the front yard, there is my younger daughter and the dog by the machine shed, there is the windbreak and the yours truly on a tractor and the horses and the barns and the house. Very nice colored photo. Got a big one for us and small ones for the girls so they can remember the house where they grew up. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea but I’m happy we got it.
That’s the best google can do? Move to America and you could have this from Google Earth. I don’t know who owns the red car in the driveway though. :dubious:
This attack on me is unwarranted. I have offered you no offense. I have merely shared a story about a man trying to sell me an unsolicited picture. I was even polite to *him *the first two times he tried to sell me something.
You may wish to have an aerial photo of your house. I support your right to that interest. But I have no need nor interest in such a picture and I gotta say you know nothing about me or my house. Just because I’m not interested doesn’t mean I have “attitude.” And my place is as attractive as the next house.
I am sure there are many many things you do not want nor need. Would you wish for strangers to show up at your house uninvited on your day off while you are sick to try to sell them to you?
Ahh, well it depends…I can see my old housemate’s car here
I live on the top floor of a very tall apartment building. Not sure what an aerial photo will do for me, other than show me what my balcony looks like from above.
I feel your pain over a dialup, but you may be expecting too much from a poorly-written site. It’s possible you did not wait long enough for the initialization. That site is java-driven (I think), and it will seize the CPU for several minutes on a slow computer before displaying the splash map. Nothing wrong, just disconcerting; I’ve learned to be patient and open another browser window for other work. After initialization, each image is slow to load (they’re big and poorly compressed), but that site is in frequent, daily use among 200 Realtors in the area (none of whom have ever heard of Firefox and don’t know what a browser is, anyway). Considering how backwards our area is otherwise, this is a godsend.
However, I have not tried it in Firefox. I will do that tomorrow, when I get to a faster connection.
I now wonder if the OP’s “salesman” will now come 'round trying to sell a picture of the turd that he’d dropped on top of the house?
Just FYI, I’m using broadband (3 Mb/s) and Firefox, and that link hosed my computer, too. Had to reboot.
It is interesting what Google Earth has in high res. I live about as far from a “big city” as you can in Australia and, not surprisingly, my town is all low res. However, just north of here is a beach with a small camping ground / holiday park, it, and surrounding areas of nothing much, are rendered in beautiful high resolution.
I bought an aerial photo of my house from a door to door salesman soon after we bought the house. When he came by, I remembered the day a small plane had flown over, low and slow. Sure enough, Cub Hubby and my son are in the picture as well as our dog. It was irresistible for me. Besides, he only asked $25 for the 8 x 12 framed photo. YMMV.
Actually, as it has now been some 15 years, I wouldn’t mind if a somebody showed up with a fresh photo of my house. We’ve made some changes since then.
One afternoon a guy came to our house selling his aerial photos.
My wife laughed at him, because we already had lots of such aerial photos (that I had taken).
I’ve commonly taken aerial shots of the houses of relatives and friends, had them enlarged and framed, and then given them to the owners as birthday or Christmas gifts. They almost always seemed thrilled to get them.
You won’t get a nice attractive photo of your home from a web site.
For those of you having trouble with the Door County online web site I linked to, here is the result of my tests. First, I installed the latest 1.5 version of Firefox on a 3-year-old Dell PC and a 2-year-old no-name PC, both with insufficient memory and a who-knows-what CPU. Both are on a WiFi net linked to a shared office Charter cable connection (4 nodes), and each machine typically gets 100Kbits/sec up & down.
Then I opened the map site in Firefox.
Both PCs worked perfectly with that site in Firefox (and IE6). Sure, if you run out of patience after 10 seconds, you might think you are hung, but if you wait for at least the 2 suggested minutes for the initialization to complete, it works fine. (After the initialization, which I think does a CPU-intensive mini-install in the local computer, each image loads in about 10-20 seconds.)
It’s certainly not the best example of software craftsmanship by a long shot, but it is an indispensible tool for us Realtors and other local map & data nuts.
Funny thing, I got into a conversation yesterday with the guy who shares my office and turns out his first job as a pilot six or seven years ago was flying a Cessna 152 (a small, two-seat single-engine plane) for a guy with a fleet of 152s and young pilots somewhere in the midwest. This is exactly what they did, fly around solo and shoot pictures of peoples’ homes with a 35mm camera. Things he told me about the job: he was expected to shoot 20 rolls of film a day, which initially took about 8 flying hours but with experience went down to two, and they just monkeyed around with the planes after they were done because their boss didn’t know they could get done that quickly. The pictures turned out better if you flew lower to the ground, but you have minimum altitudes between 500-1000’ above ground depending on whether the area is “congested” or not. The film would get turned in and developed by the company, and then the door-to-door guys take over and try to sell the pictures, starting at $200. Apparently this was owned by one guy and that’s exclusively what they did, sell people pictures of their homes.
I’ve never been hit by this kind of sales pitch because we live near military airspace so there’s not a lot of civil traffic, but we do have an aerial picture of the house taken around 70 or 80 years ago framed on our wall. It’s possible this photo marketing scheme has been going on since airplanes began flying.