Service area · South Georgian Bay, Ontario
Drone and commercial photography in Simcoe County
Sixteen municipalities and two independent cities inside one boundary, and only the top corner of it within a local drive of Thornbury.
Simcoe County
What the ground can't show you.
Simcoe County reaches from Georgian Bay and Nottawasaga Bay in the north down to the edge of the Greater Toronto Area, with Lake Simcoe along its eastern side. It has existed under the name since 1843 and was restructured into its present sixteen local municipalities in 1994, with the county seat at Midhurst. Barrie and Orillia sit geographically inside the boundary and govern themselves as separate single-tier cities, which is why the population figure quoted for the county depends entirely on whether the person quoting it counted them.
That spread is the reason a county page has to be specific rather than enthusiastic. Pete works from Thornbury, just over the line in Grey. The Nottawasaga corner — Collingwood, Wasaga Beach, Stayner, Creemore, and the Clearview and Springwater concessions behind them — is the part of this county he is in most weeks, and it is shoreline, escarpment and farmland, which is the country a ground-level camera handles worst. Barrie, Innisfil, Bradford, Orillia and Midland are an hour or more each way, and a booking there is priced with the drive inside the number rather than pretended away.
Pete is accredited member, professional photographers of canada (ppoc), holds the Master of Photographic Arts (MPA) designation, flies on a Transport Canada Basic Operations Pilot Certificate (RPAS), and carries $1,000,000 in liability insurance. He works out of Thornbury, on the Grey side of the county line, so the Nottawasaga Bay corner of Simcoe County is a local drive and anything past Barrie is quoted with the travel in it.
What gets shot here
Two kinds of work, quoted separately and often shot in the same visit. Each one has its own page for Simcoe County.
Drone and aerial photography in Simcoe County
Where an address sits in this county decides two things before anyone talks about pictures: what the flight has to be checked against, and how much of the day is spent driving. Flying across Simcoe County sets out both, and which end of the boundary is a local job.
Commercial and tourism photography in Simcoe County
Georgian Bay tourism, Midland and Penetanguishene heritage, farmland through the middle, and manufacturing at the southern end: four audiences that share a boundary and almost nothing else. Commercial work across Simcoe County treats a county brief as a routing problem first.
Two verticals have county-wide pages so far; everything else Pete shoots is covered town by town. What a shoot costs works the same way at either end of the boundary, with the drive quoted separately when there is one.
Questions
Asked about shooting in Simcoe County.
- Is all of Simcoe County a local service area?
- No, and it would be easy to imply otherwise. Pete works from Thornbury, which is just over the line in Grey County, so the Nottawasaga corner — Collingwood, Wasaga Beach, Stayner, Creemore and the townships behind them — is the part of this county he is in most weeks. Barrie, Innisfil, Bradford, Orillia and Midland are an hour or more each way. Those are perfectly bookable, they are simply quoted with the drive counted rather than folded out of sight.
- Why do Collingwood, Wasaga Beach and Creemore have their own pages if this one covers the county?
- Because they are inside it. Those three towns sit at the northern corner of Simcoe County and each has enough of its own market — a harbour and heritage downtown, fourteen kilometres of beach, a century village in a farming valley — to be worth describing on its own terms. This page is the tier above them, for anyone searching by county rather than by town, or for work that spans more than one municipality.
- Is this the same Simcoe as the town near Lake Erie?
- It is not. The town of Simcoe is in Norfolk County, roughly 200 kilometres to the south on the north shore of Lake Erie, and has nothing to do with this. Simcoe County is the upper-tier county north of the Greater Toronto Area, with Georgian Bay along its top edge and Lake Simcoe down its eastern side. Everything on this page means the county.
- How is a booking at the far end of the county handled?
- By saying what it is. A shoot at Alliston or Bradford is most of a day once the drive is counted in both directions, so it gets quoted as a travel job rather than as a local one, and where there is a second address anywhere near it the sensible move is to put both on the same route. It also changes how a marginal forecast is treated: waiting for better light is free ten minutes from home and expensive ninety minutes from it.
The work
Shot around the bay.
A sample of Pete's aerial work across the region. Simcoe County sits inside the same escarpment-and-shoreline country, flown the same way.
Nearby
The towns inside this county with pages of their own.
Three towns inside this county already have pages of their own, and they are the near end of it: listing and commercial photography in Collingwood, aerial work along the shoreline at Wasaga Beach, and village and farm photography around Creemore south in the Mad River valley.
Have a Simcoe County listing or project coming up?
Call, or send the address and target date. Pete will come back with a plan and a quote.