Flagship service
Drone and aerial photography
Aerial imagery over South Georgian Bay: shoreline estates, escarpment builds, resorts and open country.
Why Pete
Pete Mather flies three aircraft for aerial photography across South Georgian Bay, on a Transport Canada Basic Operations certificate with $1,000,000 in liability insurance. He came to drone work as a photographer rather than the other way round: seven Professional Photographers of Canada accreditations and the Master of Photographic Arts designation. He lives in Thornbury, so most of the region is a local drive and a flight can wait for the light.
Why aerial
Some properties only make sense from above.
Water frontage, acreage, tree cover, distance to the hills: the features that sell here are the ones a ground-level camera cannot capture.
Use cases
Where aerial work earns its keep.
Real estate and property
Establish the lot, the neighbourhood and the view before a buyer ever books a showing. An aerial set answers the questions ground photos raise: how close is the water, what backs onto the property, where does the lot end.
Sites and developments
One flight over an active site or a finished development, high enough that the site, its access and what surrounds it read in a single frame.
Resorts, golf and tourism
Course layouts, waterfronts and four-season campaign imagery for the resorts, clubs and operators that market this region to visitors.
The work
Aerial frames from the region.
Equipment
Three aircraft and a full Nikon kit on the ground.
Different jobs need different aircraft, and whatever the drone cannot reach gets shot from the ground on the same visit.
Aircraft
- DJI Mavic 3 Pro
- DJI Mini 4 Pro
- DJI Phantom 4 Pro
Camera bodies
- Nikon Z9
- Nikon Z8
Nikon lenses
Nikon 14-24mm, 20mm, 24-70mm, 105mm MC, 70-200mm, 180-600mm, 600mm TC, 2x teleconverter
Basic Operations pilot certificate for drone flight.
$1,000,000 in liability insurance, through a provider the PPOC recommends to its members.
What that certificate allows over a residential property, and the two documents worth asking any pilot for: Drone rules for a listing shoot.
Coverage
Aerial coverage, town by town.
Questions
Deciding whether to fly it.
Aerial coverage is worth paying for on some listings and not on others. Here is how that call gets made, and what the rules allow.
- Does this listing actually need aerial photos?
- Aerial earns its place when a ground camera cannot answer the question a buyer will ask about the property. Where does the lot end, how close is the water, what backs onto it, how does the land sit against the escarpment. If all of that is already clear from the driveway, the listing does not need a flight to sell it.
- When is drone photography not worth paying for?
- A condo or a townhouse unit with no land of its own gets little back: the aerial shows a roof and a shared parking lot. A small in-town lot on a street of similar houses is much the same. And when the surroundings are the weak part of the sale, a highway behind the fence or a yard backing onto a commercial lot, an aerial makes that the first thing a buyer sees. Ask for a quote and you will hear which of these applies to your listing before anything is booked.
- Are there properties a drone cannot legally be flown over?
- Some, and it is the address that decides, not the house. A Basic Operations certificate covers uncontrolled airspace, more than 5.6 kilometres from a certified airport's centre and more than 1.9 kilometres from a heliport's, with the aircraft below 400 feet above ground and more than 30 metres horizontally from anyone not part of the flight. Every address is checked against current airspace before a shoot is confirmed. If a property sits somewhere a Basic certificate cannot go, you hear it then rather than on the day.
- How high does the drone go?
- Canadian rules cap every drone flight at 400 feet above ground level. Most listing work sits well under that. The useful height is the one where the property and its surroundings both still read; go higher and the house shrinks without the frame telling a buyer anything new.
- Do I still need ground photos if we shoot aerials?
- Yes. Aerials set the property in its surroundings and the ground frames sell the house itself, so a listing set needs both. Pete shoots them on the same visit, which keeps the light and the season consistent across the whole set instead of stitching it together from two shoots months apart.
Where the flying happens
Seven towns inside a short drive, and a county behind them.
The aircraft go up most often for drone photography in Collingwood, because it is the busiest listing market on this stretch of the bay and the hardest place to make a property look like anything other than the twelve beside it. They earn their keep most plainly on aerial shoots in Wasaga Beach: fourteen kilometres of shoreline, and every buyer and renter asking the one question, how far to the water, that no ground-level frame has ever answered.
Up on the escarpment, aerial photography across The Blue Mountains is about elevation and lift access instead, and whether a deck really does face the bay. Closer to home there is drone work over Thornbury, where Pete lives, and flights over the Beaver Valley acreage behind Clarksburg five minutes upstream from it.
West and south the properties get bigger and the argument gets simpler. Over the farms and rural parcels around Meaford and the valley acreage near Creemore, the land is what is being sold, and forty acres has never once fitted into a photograph taken from the driveway. Every town Pete flies has its own page on what gets shot there.
Three of those towns sit at the top corner of a much larger boundary, and flying further into Simcoe County is a question about aerodromes and driving time before it is one about photography. The near end of the county is an ordinary local job; Barrie, Orillia and everything south of them is quoted with the travel in the number.
Keep reading
Where aerial work usually ends up.
Put your property in the frame.
Send the location and what you need it for. Pete will confirm airspace, timing and a quote.