Many people who offer "digital photography" aren’t offering digital aerial images! A digital photograph is where an aerial photograph (produced from standard film) is taken, developed, and then digitized using a scanner. This provides a "picture", not data. Multi-spectral data is thus not available with "digital photography". What does this mean for you?

With "digital photography":

• Individual color bands cannot be combined and analyzed
• You cannot easily get both true color and color infra-red images that were shot at the same time
• You cannot calculate indices like the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI)
• The original aerial photographs may have had "color shift" problems, which could compromise your image interpretation

For more reasons why digital aerial imaging is more useful than "digital photography", please see our "Digital Aerial Imaging vs. Conventional Aerial Photography" page.

To see an example of "color shift", please look at our "Conventional Aerial Photography vs. Digital Aerial Imaging - Can You See the Difference?" page.