The
Next Frontier in Editorial Stock Photography -
Aerial Photos
by Bob
Pardue
Aerial photos
evoke emotions
Nothing can put your place
in the world into perspective quite like looking
at an aerial photo of your own house can. Things
have gotten to the point where, for almost any
location on earth, you can find an aerial land
photo which will show you a remarkable level of
detail.
When I looked at aerial
photos of my old neighborhood, I was surprised,
and you will be too when you start to see them.
Each aerial photo is absolutely sharp and
picture perfect.
I can even see the tree
where I used to swing when I was a kid, and the
ruins of the rotted out old sandbox.
Forgive me for getting a
bit maudlin at a time like this, but it really
brings life into perspective to see it there, so
small, and pasted up on your computer screen
like that. When you start to look at an aerial
photo of your own house, you will see just what
I mean.
Being a stock photographer
photos always evoke a special feeling in me. I
look at photos the way many people look at
art.
Looking at the aerial
photo images made me think about how much
smaller the world has gotten since I was a kid.
We did not have a computer when I was growing
up, and even if we had, we would not have been
able to use it way back then to just get an
aerial photo of anyplace in the world from
Google.
I swear, kids these days
do not understand the extent of their luxuries.
But I digress. Back in
those days, everything seemed so big. The trees
in the yard – the ones that are barely a
dot on the aerial photo that I now have printed
out and pasted on my wall – were as big as
the sky themselves.
Being from the South I can
remember looking up from the grass underneath
the big old oak tree, and being literally
convinced that the top of it was in the
sky.
Now, I can instantly call
up an aerial photo of anyplace that I have never
been, and this reminds me of when I was a kid
too.
We used to play such
fantastic games of imagination, pretending that
we were Arabian princes, or medieval
adventurers, or even secret agents from some
James Bond movie.
Looking at an aerial
photo, I feel that way again in a different way,
as the whole world appears to be a click away,
sitting right at my fingertips whenever I want
it to be there. It is almost like being a
superhero. d:-)
I believe this article
shows us that we can still go back in time
through photography, don't you?
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