Ostuni

Ostuni as a bright city figure on the hill

The bright buildings of Ostuni form a compact form from above. The alleys follow the hill and draw curved lines through the roof landscape. In the wider area, fields take the place of the narrow rows of houses and give the place its frame.

The bright city hilltop

In Ostuni, the bright buildings form an almost coherent form from a greater distance. The alleys only emerge again when the section becomes narrower.

The gaps between the houses reveal how tightly built the place is. An inner courtyard opens up the roof structure, a treetop covers part of it, and a wide street separates two blocks. Anyone who looks at the photo can follow these gaps and get a clearer picture than if they tried to identify each building individually. A particularly suitable view for a city portrait is one in which the view from a clearly visible roof can move on to the neighboring streets.

The graduation of the mountain ranges

In a mountain landscape the view is divided into the foreground, middle slopes and distant heights. What merges into a closed surface in flat light separates into individual ridges when lit from the side. A gap between two ridges is often enough for the viewer to estimate the depth. For a landscape photograph, this gap is an important part of the subject. If you leave them standing while cropping, the spatial effect is retained even in a smaller image format.

Order along a line

To find your way around an unfamiliar townscape, you can follow a continuous line until there is a noticeable change in direction. It is often only on this path that small junctions or free spaces become apparent. The image section determines how much of this order remains visible. If the beginning of the line remains in the foreground and its destination remains in the back part of the image, a photograph has a clear reading direction even without drawn arrows. It's particularly worth looking at in a portrait format.

Warm tones within the series

If you browse through the 24 aerial photos, you can stay at shot 5 and shot 1 for a comparison. In the second view, warm reds and browns have more weight than in the first. Red-brown and yellowish areas are particularly noticeable next to cooler surfaces. What is interesting when comparing is whether they are concentrated on a single object or appear spread out across the entire view.

For Shot 1 and Shot 24, the same day is noted in the image files, October 18, 2019. The recording times recorded are approximately 16 minutes apart. ISO 100 and an exposure time of 1/640 second are recorded for both files.

In the Aerial Videos section there are 5 clips for this article. An example is “City of Ostuni in Italy from the air”. Its preview leads directly to the video in the aerial photographer's Adobe Stock portfolio.

Prepare a cityscape for readers

For a city history, it can be informative to place the aerial photograph next to a street view. In one picture the roof is the reliable reference point, in the other it is often the entrance or the facade. The transition is best achieved via a corner, a square or a visible junction. An aerial photographer can take this connection into account when taking photos. In the printed photo series, a brief note about which side of the street the next photo was taken from is often enough.

Related motifs in the aerial photo archive

If you are looking for related motifs, you can start with Lucignano. In Lucignano, the roofs wind in strikingly closed rings around the town center. It's worth taking a second look at Italy - Pisa. The aerial photos of Pisa provide a view of a largely flat urban landscape.