Drone and aerial photography in The Blue Mountains

Elevation is the entire argument up here, and it only reads from above. Aerial photography of chalets and escarpment lots settles how close the lift actually is, what the property looks like with snow on the hills behind it, and whether the deck faces the water or the neighbour.

The municipality runs from the shoreline at Craigleith up the face of the Niagara Escarpment to the ski hills, which packs a great deal of vertical into a short drive. That is what makes the flight worth paying for here. A photograph taken at the road cannot show a slope, and slope is what most of these properties are priced on.

Sightlines matter as much as elevation. From the right altitude a single frame holds the property, the hill behind it and the bay in front, and a buyer three hours away can tell at a glance what they would be looking at from the window. Most of the aerial work in the portfolio was shot in this country: escarpment on one side, bay on the other.

Flying a slope is not the same as flying flat ground, and the reason is that altitude stops meaning one thing. Over a shoreline property the ground under the aircraft stays where it is. Over an escarpment lot the ground rises through the shot, so the height that frames the house correctly is not the height that clears the trees behind it, and the flight has to be planned around the terrain rather than around a single number.

Wind is the other terrain effect and it decides more shoot days than the forecast suggests. Air moving off Georgian Bay hits the face of the escarpment and goes up it, so conditions at the top of a lot can be meaningfully different from conditions at the bottom of the same driveway. A flat calm morning down at Craigleith is not a promise about Swiss Meadows.

Which direction the property faces is worth establishing before anything else, because up here it is the whole argument. A chalet with an unobstructed line down to the bay and a chalet with a neighbour's roof in the way can look nearly identical from the road and are not remotely the same listing. One frame from the right altitude and heading settles it, and it is usually the frame the buyer remembers.

The resorts, private clubs and golf courses that occupy most of this hill are photographed for a different reader entirely: somebody deciding where to spend a weekend rather than where to live. Commercial and tourism photography in The Blue Mountains is about selling a season to people who have not arrived yet.