Orthophotos are a standard requirement in archaeological documentation; yet they differ in several respects from aerial orthoimaging. The required large scales of end-products call for close-range photography, usually taken from low altitude or with raised cameras for horizontal recording. Special camera platforms need to be devised to this effect, such as the flexible low-cost devices (small balloon; adapted fishing-rod) used here. With such ‘unstable’ platforms image tilt, recording distances and overlap are not easily controlled, hence irregular strip geometries are expected. Besides, the non-metric cameras used have unknown inner orientation and often large lens distortion. Our experiences with such bundle adjustments are discussed. Precise surface description is a further issue, more than often involving modeling of rough surfaces with abrupt changes, discontinuities and protruding parts. Examples from different projects illustrate the authors’ experience as regards data collection allowing generation of ‘vertical triangles’, indispensable for creating ‘true orthophotos’ with commercial software. A final aspect addressed in this contribution concerns the exploitation of the numerous existing line drawings of sites. This graphical information, mostly planar, might be extensively used as exclusive ground control to produce orthomosaics for innumerable sites, at least as basic archival documentation. Rather than performing purely planimetric strip adjustment, an approach is tested here which additionally makes use of suitably weighted model elevations of such planar ‘control points’ derived from the maps. The presented results show an increase in accuracy, thus indicating that in several cases existing 2D information may help minimise, or even eliminate, the need for control surveys. The discussed aspects of archaeological orthophotography are illustrated with examples from various Greek sites, namely the parodoi of the ancient theatre of Sparta, the ancient castle of Aigosthena, the ancient theatre of Zea in Piraeus and an archaic site of Zeus in Athens.