ISLE OF WIGHT · SOUTH COAST · NATIONAL BY ARRANGEMENT
Lane Aerial Media Ltd
Accurate geospatial dataset for industry; high‑impact aerial storytelling for property & event professionals — driving cost efficiencies, visibility, engagement & sales.
Digital surface model — our own survey data, turning
Before you compare quotes
Ask the same four questions of anyone else you are speaking to. The answers are where the real difference in price sits.
Targets laid and surveyed with an Emlid Reach RS4, plus an independent check point, on every survey. Accuracy comes from the method, not the aircraft — so ask what control was used.
Your data stays live for a year, extended by arrangement. Reports open for whoever you send them to — a client, an insurer, a planning officer — with no account to create.
Survey data is commonly handed over on a platform the client then subscribes to, at roughly £3,000 a year per seat. On a five-person team that costs more than the survey. You are never asked for it.
Lane Aerial Media Ltd is not VAT registered, so nothing is added on top — where survey quotes are usually shown excluding it. Worth checking which one you are reading.
What we fly
Every job starts as a flight plan — airspace checked, overlap and altitude set to the deliverable you need.
High-overlap capture processed into point clouds, meshes and digital twins — including volumetric measurement for stockpiles, cut/fill and earthworks quantities.
POINT CLOUDS · VOLUMETRICS · MESH/OBJ · DIGITAL TWINS
View photogrammetry & 3D →
Topographic survey, orthomosaic mapping and site-progress capture for construction, land and coastal monitoring projects.
ORTHOMOSAIC · VOLUMETRICS · OSGB36 / BNG
View surveying & mapping →
Full-roof visual condition surveys shot from the air — no scaffolding, no ladders, every plane covered in a single flight.
RGB STILLS · ANNOTATED REPORT · NO ACCESS EQUIPMENT
View roof inspection →
Corporate events, festivals, property launches and marketing shot from the air — graded stills and edited video, delivered ready to publish. Recent work includes Strings Festival at The Woodland Venue, Robin Hill.
4K/10-BIT · RAW STILLS · SUNRISE/GOLDEN HOUR
View event coverage →Why drone photogrammetry
Where an aerial photogrammetric survey outperforms a conventional ground survey.
| Factor | Traditional ground survey | LAM drone photogrammetry |
|---|---|---|
| Time on site | Multiple visits, often days for larger sites | Single flight session, typically hours |
| Site access & safety | Personnel on foot across the whole site, including unstable ground, height or live plant areas | No one needs to physically access hazardous, unstable or restricted ground |
| Coverage | Discrete surveyed points and cross-sections | Continuous coverage — every square metre of the site captured |
| Repeat monitoring | A fresh visit, and cost, each time the site changes | Repeat flights overlay directly for progress and volumetric change over time |
| Data density | Individual survey points | Dense point clouds & true-colour orthomosaics — millions of points per hectare |
| Deliverables | 2D drawings, spot levels, written reports | Orthomosaic, point cloud, mesh, DEM/DTM & volumetric report |
| Equipment | Standard survey-grade instruments | DJI Matrice 4E with RTK & Emlid Reach RS4 base station |
| Accuracy | Survey-grade, dependent on method & equipment | Survey-grade with Emlid Reach RS4 ground control & RTK positioning ¹ |
| Cost driver | Scales with crew time and number of site visits | Scales with site size and deliverable complexity ² |
Why the equipment matters
Professional drone surveying relies on a carefully integrated ecosystem. Every component must be calibrated to work together — a single mismatched piece degrades the entire system's accuracy.
Which is why the aircraft is only part of the answer. An RTK airframe flown without ground control, a base station left on an unchecked position, overlap set for speed rather than for the deliverable — each on its own is enough to put a figure out by more than the tolerance the job was quoted to. The parts are chosen to work as one system, and the checks exist to prove they did.
Output formats
Illustrative examples of the deliverable formats each service produces.
Output formats shown as diagrams — see recent aerial work for real imagery.
GSD ≈ 2–4 CM/PX · 70–80% OVERLAP
STRUCTURE-FROM-MOTION · RGB-COLOURED
DEM/DSM · CONTOUR INTERVAL 0.5M
4K VIDEO · RAW STILLS · GRADED DELIVERY
What it costs
Starting points for the five ways clients buy. What you are paying for is what you end up holding — every job quoted fixed once we know the site and what the output has to do.
From£1,950 / project
A site you can measure, argue from and build decisions on.
A MEASURABLE DATASET, NOT JUST IMAGERY
From£750 / asset
A measurable replica of a building or asset, kept live so your team can go back to it.
A RECORD THAT STAYS LIVE
From£295 / property
Evidence to price a repair from, without scaffold or a ladder.
From£295
Finished media you can publish, not rushes you have to fix.
From£450 / day
The one thing we do sell by the day — because here you are buying flight capability, and the outcome is yours to produce.
ADD PROCESSING & GROUND CONTROL ON REQUEST
Prices are what you pay. Lane Aerial Media Ltd is not VAT registered, so there is nothing to add on top — where survey quotes are usually shown excluding it. A quote of £1,625 plus VAT costs you £1,950 — the same as ours, before they charge you to look at it. Worth checking which one you are reading.
Site size and complexity, the deliverables you need, how much ground control the accuracy requires, and whether the work needs repeating over time for progress monitoring. Island work carries no travel charge at all — we are already here. Mainland and South Coast projects carry a £750 minimum to cover the Solent crossing. The line between a digital twin and a full site survey is what the output has to do: a twin is a record of an asset you measure from and return to, while a site survey adds volumetrics, contours, DEM/DTM and CAD exports across the whole site. Several structures on one site are quoted together rather than separately, because the control network and the visit are established once and the second building costs far less than the first. What does not move it is how long we happen to be standing in the field — a survey that takes twenty minutes to fly is worth what the figures are worth, not what twenty minutes is worth. Tell us the site and what the output has to do, and you'll get a fixed quote rather than a range.
You'll get a fixed price rather than a range, usually within one to two working days. No obligation, and no pressure to book a flight.
Where we operate
LAM Geospatial offers services on the Isle of Wight, across the South Coast, and nationally by arrangement — every South Coast site within same-day reach.
How a job runs
The same sequence whether it's a half-hour shoot or a multi-hectare survey — and it does not stop at handover.
We confirm the deliverable you need, the site, and any access or scheduling constraints.
Flight lines, altitude and overlap are planned and checked against NOTAMs and controlled airspace before we fly.
On-site flying to the plan — stills, video or mapping passes, weather window permitting.
Raw data is processed into the agreed output — graded footage, orthomosaic, point cloud or model.
Completed datasets are delivered through our own online viewer — pan, measure and share your model straight from a browser, no specialist software needed — alongside the raw files in whichever format you work in.
Your data stays live with us for twelve months, extended by arrangement. Nobody on your side buys a licence to open it and no one is charged a seat, so a report goes to a client, an insurer or a planning officer and simply opens. Most of the industry stops at step five and hands you a folder.
It is held in the UK and private from the moment it lands. A dataset is visible only to the people you name, access is granted and withdrawn on your instruction, and we will delete it outright whenever you ask. Your data is never sold, shared with anyone you have not named, or reused for any purpose of ours.
About
Lane Aerial Media Ltd
Accurate geospatial dataset for industry; high-impact aerial storytelling for property & event professionals — driving cost efficiencies, visibility, engagement & sales.
LAM Geospatial is the operating name of Lane Aerial Media Ltd, a drone photography, survey and mapping business offering services on the Isle of Wight, across the South Coast, and nationally by arrangement.
We work with construction and civil engineering teams, land and estate managers, marketing agencies and coastal or environmental organisations who need either a striking image or an accurate dataset — often both from the same flight.
Meet the team & see the work →Questions
What clients usually want to know before booking a first flight.
Accuracy comes from ground control points, RTK positioning and flight design — not from the aircraft alone. Done properly, it's comparable to conventional survey methods for most engineering and volumetric work. Project-specific accuracy figures are confirmed at quote stage once we know the site and deliverable required.
Survey and photogrammetry projects start at £1,950, event and aerial media from £295, roof inspection from £295, a digital twin from £750, and pilot-and-aircraft hire from £450 a day for trade clients handling their own processing. What moves the figure is site size, the deliverables you need, how much ground control the accuracy demands and travel beyond the South Coast — see pricing for what each includes. We are not VAT registered, so quoted prices are final with nothing to add on top. Send us the site and the output you need and we'll quote it fixed.
Often, yes. Our CAA PDRA01 authorisation permits closer operation near people and property than standard rules allow, and every job includes an airspace and NOTAM check beforehand. Some locations need additional permission from air traffic control, which we factor into the flight plan.
Flights depend on safe wind, visibility and precipitation limits. If conditions aren't safe or compliant, we reschedule to the next suitable window.
Typically orthomosaics (GeoTIFF/JPEG), point clouds (LAS/LAZ), meshes (OBJ), elevation models (GeoTIFF/XYZ) and PDF reports — or graded video and RAW stills for photography work. Let us know if your workflow needs a specific format.
Completed datasets are delivered through our own client portal. You open the model in a browser and work with it directly — pan it, measure distances and levels, take cross-sections, calculate volumes and share it with a link. There is no specialist GIS or CAD software required and nothing to install. The underlying files are supplied alongside it for your own workflows.
No. It opens in an ordinary web browser on a laptop, tablet or phone. There is no per-seat licence for your team, and no cost to whoever you forward it on to — a contractor, client, insurer or planning officer can open the same model you are looking at. This is worth checking when you compare quotes. It is common for survey data to be handed over on a third-party platform the client is then expected to subscribe to, with seats on the mainstream tools running to roughly £3,000 a year each. On a five-person team that is more than the survey. We host your data ourselves as part of the project price, and a report you send to a client, an insurer or a planning officer opens for them without an account.
The raw files are yours permanently from the day they are delivered — they sit on your systems, not ours, and nothing expires. The interactive model is hosted for you for twelve months after handover at no extra charge, and can be extended by arrangement or re-hosted later if you need it back. If you would rather hold everything in-house from the outset, we can deliver the files on their own.
Your data is held in the United Kingdom, and Lane Aerial Media Ltd is registered with the Information Commissioner's Office as a data controller under reference ZC189317. A survey is private from the moment it is processed. It is not indexed, not public, and not visible to anyone but the people you name — access is granted on your instruction and withdrawn the same way. Ask us to delete a dataset and it goes.
We do not sell your data, share it with anyone you have not named, or reuse it for our own purposes. Nothing from a commercial project appears in our own marketing without your written agreement, which is why the examples on this site are not identified.
On personal data specifically: aerial imagery can capture people, vehicles and neighbouring property. We plan flights to capture what the job needs and no more, and where identifiable detail appears incidentally we will blur it on request before anything is shared onward. If your organisation needs a data processing agreement in place, ask and we will put one in front of you before the flight rather than after it.
The raw files are yours outright. If you would rather nothing sat with us at all, we can deliver the files and host nothing.
Every figure in a report opens back to the measurement it came from, on the model, so it can be inspected rather than argued about. Where a volume, level or quantity sits between two parties — a contractor and a client, a progress claim, a material sale — both are looking at the same captured site rather than at two spreadsheets. Ground control points and independent check points are recorded as part of the job, so the basis for the figures is documented from the start.
Get in touch
Tell us about the site and the deliverable you're after — we'll come back with availability and a price.