Dade City, Florida.

Dade City does not look like the rest of the Tampa Bay region and that is precisely its appeal. The land here genuinely rolls, which is rare enough in Florida to be a selling point, and the town has a historic downtown with a courthouse square, brick streets and antique shops that have kept their character rather than been redeveloped away.

The housing follows the terrain and the history. There is real turn of the century and early twentieth century stock in and around the downtown grid, Victorian and Craftsman homes with deep porches, tall ceilings, original wood and the small windows that go with that era. These are flash and bracket interiors, because the character that sells them lives in woodwork and detail that a single exposure loses to shadow. There is mid-century housing on larger lots, and there is a substantial agricultural market: groves, pasture, ranch parcels and farmhouses on acreage running out toward San Antonio, Lacoochee and the Withlacoochee.

The rolling ground changes the aerial work in a way flat Florida does not. Elevation is a genuine feature here, both for the views it produces and because buyers are conscious of grade and drainage, and aerials flown to show contour rather than straight down do far more justice to a property on a hill than a standard overhead.

For agricultural listings the aerial is the primary image: boundaries, cleared pasture, outbuildings, road frontage and how much of the parcel is actually usable.

Dade City is also far enough from the coast that the afternoon storm pattern arrives later than it does on the bay, which occasionally makes a late shoot here workable when it would not be in Tampa. It is still not something to plan around in August.