Simcoe County · South Georgian Bay, Ontario
Drone and aerial photography in Simcoe County
A county with three aerodromes and a military base inside its boundary is one where the airspace question is asked before the photography question.
The useful thing an aircraft does over a county this size is settle scale. Drone and aerial photography here is asked for on parcels, shorelines and sites that are simply too large to describe from a driveway, and the Nottawasaga end of the boundary is nothing but that: fourteen kilometres of beach, the harbour and shipyard lands, and a survey grid of concessions running back off the water.
Where the county differs from any single town on this site is that the answer to "can it be flown" changes several times inside one boundary. Collingwood Regional Airport sits in Clearview Township. Edenvale Aerodrome is on the Highway 26 corridor between Stayner and Barrie. Lake Simcoe Regional Airport is at Oro-Medonte on the far side of the county. CFB Borden occupies a large block in the middle of it.
None of that says where a given address may or may not be flown, and this page is not going to pretend it does. It says that the check is an address-by-address one made against current charts before a date is agreed, and that on a county this crowded it is worth making early rather than on the morning of the shoot.
Distance is the other thing that behaves differently at county scale, and it is worth being plain about how it is handled. A flight at the Georgian Bay end is a short drive and gets quoted like any other local job. A flight at Alliston or Bradford is most of a day once the drive is counted twice, and the honest way to price that is to say so and to look for a second address nearby rather than to bury it in an hourly rate.
That pushes county-wide work toward being planned rather than booked one address at a time. An owner with parcels at two ends of the boundary gets a better outcome from one route agreed in advance than from two separate call-outs, because the second visit is paying for the same drive again. It also changes what the weather does to a schedule: a marginal forecast is a shrug on a ten-minute drive and an expensive gamble on a ninety-minute one.
The county's own geography splits the flying about as cleanly as its politics do. North of the Highway 26 line the ground is water, bluff and escarpment, and the frames that matter are about frontage and what a property looks out at. South and east it flattens into farmland and commuter development, where the questions are acreage, boundary and what is being built next door — the same aircraft, a different reason for putting it up.
The businesses on the ground under all of that are the other half of the work here, and they are spread across the same awkward distances: commercial and tourism photography in Simcoe County covers an economy that is a beach town at one end of the boundary and an assembly plant at the other.
The drone and aerial photography page covers the same work across the whole of South Georgian Bay, Ontario, without the Simcoe County specifics above. Everything Pete shoots in Simcoe County lists the other one, along with his accreditations and the certificate he flies on.
Questions
Asked about this work in Simcoe County.
- Do CFB Borden and the county's airports rule out flying here?
- They rule out guessing, which is not the same thing. Simcoe County has Collingwood Regional Airport in Clearview, Edenvale Aerodrome on the Highway 26 corridor, Lake Simcoe Regional Airport at Oro-Medonte and the CFB Borden lands in the middle of it, so what applies at one address in this county is not what applies at another. The answer for a specific property comes from checking that address against current charts before a date is agreed, and it is worth asking early rather than on the morning of the shoot.
- Can a property at the south end of the county be flown on the same trip as one at the bay?
- Yes, and it is usually the better arrangement. The two ends of this county are an hour and a half apart, so two separate call-outs pay for that drive twice. Where the addresses can share a day, the planning question becomes which of them needs the last hour of light, because only one of them can have it and that decision is better made in advance than at five o'clock on the day.
- What does an aerial add on flat farmland in the south?
- Boundary, scale and what adjoins the parcel. The southern half of this county is farmland and commuter development running into each other, and the questions that come up there are how much land there is, where it actually ends, and what is being built on the other side of the treeline. All three read immediately from a few hundred feet up and none of them read at all from the road.
Simcoe County
The other work in this county.
Both are quoted separately, and at the Georgian Bay end of the county they usually fit into one visit.
Drone and aerial photography in Simcoe County?
Send the address and what needs to be in frame. Pete will come back with what the flight can show and what it costs.