p16019coll5

About this collection

The collection currently includes sets of aerial photographs of Santa Cruz, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and Monterey Counties from the 1930's through the 1970's.  See the list of digitized flights on the library website for coverage maps, selected photo indexes and more detailed place coverage.  Help us add descriptive information to these photos!  If you recognize streets, rivers, buildings, cities, or other features in these photos, please add them in the comments or tags fields for the photos.

 

 



Following are the flights currently available, linked to the photos in that flight:



What do you see when you look at an aerial photograph?

If you haven't looked at an aerial photograph, you might be surprised what you can and can't see. You can easily see roads, geographic features such as shores, mountains, the larger rivers, lakes, landslides, faultlines, etc. Creeks and smaller rivers can be obscured by the trees that often grow along them. Depending on the scale, you may be able to see parks, individual buildings, and similar-sized objects in the landscape. A serials of aerials of the same area can show you urban growth or the loss/increase in farming or changes in the road structure. What you usually can't see with aerials are small landscape features such as details on fences, yards, buildings, or a property's berms.  

Aerial Photograph Formats

Aerials also come in three basic types: black & white, color, and color-infrared. Black & white shows good contrast and detail. We have B&W photos dating back to 1928. Beginners often like the color photos, because it is sometimes easier for them to identify familiar objects using the color. Our earliest color photos are from 1973. Color-infrared can show landscape features that otherwise aren't very clear, but they present these features in "false" (that is, unfamiliar) colors.

What is scale?

Scale on an aerial photograph is the ratio between the size of the object in the photo compared to the size of the object that was photographed. We indicate these by notation: 1:4200, 1:7200, 1:28,000, and so on. The smaller the number after the colon, the closer to the ground the picture was taken. These can be roughly translated into feet and inches. For instance, 1:4200 means that 1 inch on the photograph equals 350 feet on the ground (350 X 12 = 4200); 1:7200 means that 1 inch on the photograph equals 600 feet on the ground (600 X 12).
 
Select the collections to add or remove from your search
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
 
OK