There are drones which carry full DSLR cameras or even cinematography film cameras. I don't think you will be able to tell if the camera was hoisted by a crane or a drone based on image quality.
> given the guys in the picture are on cherry picker type cranes, I'm guessing the photographer was on another of those
I don't think so! That picture appears to be the fitment check of SN20 with B4 on 06th of August 2021.
I believe this picture shows the same scene from a different viewpoint: https://starship-spacex.fandom.com/wiki/SN20/Ship_20?file=E8...
As you can see the stack is standing next to the integration tower. If I were to hazard a guess most likely the photographer was on the tower. One could attempt to verify this by matching the terrain in the background with the view one would expect from the integration tower.
I found a youtube of drone footage of flying around starship and I think the camera is pointing south west like this (time set to 6 seconds in)
https://youtu.be/0sA9rGc80Y4?t=6
whereas from the tower it would be looking north east.
Even if you can get the resolution from a drone camera, the shot looks like someone spent quite a while lining everything up to look nice and like the historic NY pic.
I don't know. There are really good drone photographers. They have remote controls for all the settings, and remote viewing is also possible. They could have lined it up with the drone. Or made the photo with even higher resolution and cropped it to perfection. Or made hundreds of photos and selected the best.
Not saying it was a drone. But the "quality looks a bit high for a drone" is not convincing me.
> given you can see the beach with a car to the left of starship and land to the right it suggests the camera was looking south west whereas from the tower you'd be looking north west.
I think you are right. Now based on that I think it was probably not photographed from the integration tower.
There is a fourth place it could have been shot from: There is the crane holding up the starship. You can see it on this image of the same hoist operation: https://x.com/BocaChicaGal/status/1423629854877028355/photo/...
The reason I don't think it was shot from a fourth cherry-picker is because I can't see a fourth one in any of the photos. It seems they only had 3 up on that day and they were all in the frame.
There is footage here that looks like it might be from that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi5DXe_65J8&t=52s
but nowadays it can be a drone.