A bird's-eye view is an elevated view of an object from above, with a perspective as though

the observer were a bird, often used in the making of blueprints, floor plans, and maps.
It can be an aerial photograph, but also a drawing. Before manned flight was common, the term
"bird's eye" was used to distinguish views drawn from direct observation at high locations (for
example a mountain or tower), from those constructed from an imagined (bird's) perspectives. Bird's
eye views as a genre have existed since classical times. The last great flourishing of them was in the
mid-to-late 19th century, when bird's eye view prints were popular in the United States and Europe.

Bird's-flight view[edit]

Part of the "Copperplate" map of London, surveyed between 1553 and 1559, depicting a bird's-flight view of
the Moorfields area

A distinction is sometimes drawn between a bird's-eye view and a bird's-flight view, or "view-plan
in isometrical projection".[1]Whereas a bird's-eye view shows a scene from a single viewpoint (real or
imagined) in true perspective, including, for example, the foreshortening of more distant features, a
bird's-flight view combines a vertical plan of ground-level features with perspective views of buildings
and other standing features, all presented at roughly the same scale. [2] The landscape appears "as it
would unfold itself to any one passing over it, as in a balloon, at a height sufficient to abolish
sharpness of perspective, and yet low enough to allow of distinct view of the scene beneath". [3] The
technique was popular among local surveyors and cartographers of the sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries.

See also[edit]
Look up bird's-eye
view in Wiktionary, the
free dictionary.

Wikimedia Commons has

media related to Bird's-
eye view.

 Aerial landscape art

 Aerial perspective (disambiguation)

 Aerial photography

 Camera angle

 Cinematic techniques

 Filmmaking

 Google Earth

 Pictorial map

 Pictometry

 Plans (drawings)

 Top-down perspective

 Video production

 Worm's-eye view