Aerial Photogrammetry

When the surface is open and clearly visible: a stockpile, a quarry face, an active construction site, a flat roof, broad earthworks: photogrammetry is the right tool. We fly a tight lawn-mower pattern over the site, capture hundreds to thousands of overlapping high-resolution photos, and software triangulates pixel matches across images to reconstruct a precisely scaled 3D model and a top-down orthophoto map.

When to choose photogrammetry vs LiDAR

Two simple rules. If your site is open, dry, and you can see the surface, photogrammetry is faster to fly, less expensive per acre, and produces a richer-looking visual deliverable. If your site is wooded, holds standing water, or you specifically need the bare-earth surface beneath vegetation, that’s a LiDAR job. We scope to whichever tool the deliverable actually needs.

What we deliver after a photogrammetry mission

• Georeferenced orthomosaic in GeoTIFF: the top-down map of your whole site, every pixel measurable.
• Digital Elevation Model (DEM) capturing the surface height across the site.
• Textured 3D mesh in .OBJ or .FBX format: the cinematic-looking 3D site model that drops into modeling software, Sketchfab, or a portal.
• Image-derived point cloud for measurement workflows in tools that prefer points to meshes.
• Contour file at the interval your project requires.
• KML / KMZ for review in Google Earth: useful for stakeholder reviews that don’t have CAD or GIS software handy.
• Accuracy report tying the result to ground control with horizontal and vertical residuals.

Survey-grade capture, controlled to standards

We fly high-resolution mechanical-shutter mapping cameras on survey-grade UAVs with RTK or PPK GNSS for tight control reduction. Horizontal accuracy is reported against ASPRS Positional Accuracy Standards as a function of Ground Sample Distance: and we choose the GSD at the flight planning stage to match what your deliverable actually needs, not just the resolution of the sensor.

The questions buyers ask first

• What Ground Sample Distance can you achieve? Tied directly to flight altitude: typical project work runs 1-5 cm/pixel, with higher altitude / lower GSD when speed matters and lower altitude / finer GSD when small detail does.
• Horizontal and vertical accuracy? Reported against ASPRS standards. Most well-controlled sites land in the few-centimeter horizontal range; vertical is generally 2-3× the horizontal.
• What ground control do you need from us? Usually nothing: we place and survey our own targets. If your site already has surveyed monuments, we use those.
• How often can we re-fly? As often as you want. A weekly cadence over an active site is the basis of our construction monitoring programs.
• Will the deliverable land in our software without reformatting? We confirm the target platform: Civil 3D, ArcGIS, Propeller, DroneDeploy, MicroStation, Sketchfab: before flight and deliver in whatever format that workflow expects.

Who buys photogrammetry

Construction contractors, aggregate operators (stockpile measurement and haul-road surveys), land developers, environmental assessment firms, and broad-acre agriculture operations. The pattern: the surface is visible, the project values a richer visual deliverable, and the budget runs tighter than survey-grade LiDAR.

How it’s priced

• Per-acre for area mapping, with a minimum mobilization fee
• Per-acre rate drops with site size: large sites are dramatically cheaper per acre than small ones
• Rate rises with required accuracy (finer GSD, tighter ground control, more rigorous reporting) and with the number of distinct deliverables
• Photogrammetry generally sits in a much lower per-acre band than survey-grade LiDAR: when the deliverable allows it, that’s the cost-effective choice