Aerial Photography - Shooting from tall buildings

Aerial photography is an interesting field of photography. Becoming airborne and shooting the landscape, cityscapes, or sceneries from perspectives we usually are not used to. This gives images a special and unique touch mainly by means of perspective but also by means of color contrast and composition.

There are several possibilities to get into these arial perspectives such as tall buildings, a flight in a plane, or a flight in a helicopter, or in recent times using drones and camera remote control.

Paris, la Défense

Tall buildings:

The easiest and cheapest possibility is probably by just climbing a high building and shooting from the top.
I did this on several occasions. For example from the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
The image on the on the right exhibits a lot of interesting features. Almost central symmetry of the architecture and the park in the foreground. The modern city of la Défense in the background, and the interesting texture of the buildings in between.

The image on the left was taken in Shanghai from the top of Shanghai Tower.
The image gives an impression of the endless cityscape of Shanghai as well as of the gigantic size of skyscrapers in the commercial city center of Shanghai.

Taking such images in black and white gives a very nice texture to these photographs. There are a lot of overlying patterns in arial images of cities which lead to interesting texture.










A similar picture is the image on the right of lower Manhattan in New York taken from the top of Empire State Building.

An interesting aspect of this image are the clear lines of the streets. With the Flatiron Building breaking the perfect rectangular symmetry in this texture.

Interesting perspective is also to look straight down a building. As in the image on the left.
This picture was taken in Dubai from the visitors platform of the Burj Kalifa, the tallest building in the world.

Vehicles on the road look like toys, and the roads seem artificial.

Not only roads and vehicles look like little toys, but also very tall sky scrapers when viewed from a height of more than 800 meters.

Interesting shots can be achieved when including reflections on glass walls of the skyscraper into the framing.
The image on the left exhibits true and reflected Dubai city scape along the Persian Gulf coast line.