Height for photos of quarter sections

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Need to photograph about 8 quarter sections (160 acres). What height is beat for photograohing farm land?

Primarily looking to see where water is in the land.
 
The area covered can be calculated for a given lens angle and altitude. Are you looking for water in the land or on the land? Might be an application for a waypoint mission(s).
 
I would fly at 400', but you may well need to create a composite photo, or several for that much area from that height with the lens on the Phantom. If you fly lower you will get better resolution but you'll have to take a lot more photos. You can do this by using Litchi App (and others) by creating a waypoint mission consisting of transects that cover the areas in question. As your Phantom flies the mission you take photos every three seconds or so (enough so the photos overlap) with the camera pointed straight down. You then import the photos into free composite software like Image Composite Editor and it will stitch them together into one large photo. I've attached a test composite photo I created of a development by my house. The area is about 10 acres and I took about 30 photos from 200' (looks higher) to create the composite:


03052015%20Construction%20Aerial_zps4nhmjkhi.jpg
 
Need to photograph about 8 quarter sections (160 acres). What height is beat for photographing farm land?
There's no simple answer to that Q.
It all depends upon what level of detail you want to show.
It's not practical but as an example, if you wanted a vertical shot that covered 160acres in just one photo, you'd have to fly at 1800 feet (which is higher than your Phantom can fly).
That image would be of an area 3240 x 2160 feet = 160 acres.

At a height of 400 feet, each vertical photo would cover 720 x 480 feet or about 8 acres.

You can create a composite image from any height.
The lower you fly, the more photos to cover the area.
I created a highly detailed orthophoto of 35 acres from 115 photos shot at 246 feet with lots of ovelap.
For that sort of work you really need something like DroneDeploy to handle all the mission planning, flying and shooting.
 
CAMANGLE.JPG
It's not practical but as an example, if you wanted a vertical shot that covered 160acres in just one photo, you'd have to fly at 1800 feet (which is higher than your Phantom can fly).

What lens angle are you using when calculating the above? I'm asking only because I want to be sure how to calculate the coverage per photo. Thanks

Edit: Assuming a lens angle of 94 degrees, the drawing shows the horizontal width that the camera would seem to cover for a given altitude. Am I doing this correctly? Thanks
 
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