Landscape mapping in the anglophone countries has gone through several phases. Leaving aside the seriously historical stuff prior to the 19 century, most such mapping was either cadastral (for property boundaries, municipal rates -what Americans call taxes- and minor works) or topographic; the latter was done mostly for military purposes. It wasn't until the latter half of the 19th century that mappers got serious about geodetic surveying for land masses and started coordinating the global requirements. Once they had, the mappers started collecting the necessary data to fit all the info into geodetically respectable maps.
In the middle half of the 20th century (from the '30s to the '80s, in the "developed" world), aerial photos were the main method of acquiring topographic detail to put into these maps and air photos for this purpose were mostly 'verticals' although 'obliques' were also used. As an aside, there's a lovely story about such mapping photography that I leave for another time. Colour airphotos delivered an order of magnitude more info than B&W piccies but they weren't generally available (in Australia, at least) until the late '60s.
Then we started getting satellite photography, which removed some aspects of distortion inherent with aeroplane-based photography but introduced others. John is spot on about the coloration of satellite prints. The satellites use sensors recording (digitally) anything up to 25 wavelengths spread across the electromagnetic spectrum and customers select the ones they wish to combine for their own purposes; the term 'false colour' is used for such images. The resolution used to be 100' (30m) wide pixels on Landsat and 5m wide for SPOT but these have probably been changed since I last checked.
Such resolution is way below that of even routine aerial photography. Another problem for us southerners is that all the sensors were set to meet the requirements of the satellite owners, all of whom were from the northern hemisphere. Australian reflectivities (to say nothing of sensitivities) are quite different and I seem to recall the same is true for African landscapes, meaning we have to do our own fiddles (sorry, "massaging") for interpretive purposes.
The lack of perspective distortion means that most image processing for mapping (read "GIS") purposes is done from satellite data and air photography these days is directed mostly towards municipal and engineering works or 'personal' customers, all of whom are essentially possessors of private commercial data.