The project „Optical 3D Bridge Inspection”, which is part of DFG’s priority program “100+”, aims to capture surface geometry and damages of prestressed concrete bridges with high-resolution optical tools to assist the structural health monitoring process. In a multi-scale and multi-epoch approach, the building structure is recorded in total with UAV-based cameras in millimetre-resolution – extracting deformation and areas of interest where damages are visible – and in those hotspots, an even higher resolved image block and also a micrometre-resolution structured light scanner (SLS) capture is taken. Detected damages are compared between multiple epochs, monitoring their development. In an experiment, we demonstrated all measurements and their linking possibilities on a reinforced concrete plate under controlled load. The global image block showed that even the smallest cracks with a width of 0.05mm were visible in the images with a spatial resolution of 0.16mm per pixel. Also, the three-dimensional reconstruction based on the images was able to mirror the plate accurately in all epochs. However, it was shown that manually applied speckles reduced the noise drastically, compared to areas in which the surface only consisted of blank light concrete with only a few microfeatures. The underlying deformation was nevertheless accurately reconstructed in all areas. It is shown that the SLS can measure the width and detailed shape of a crack, which enabled us to track changes between multiple epochs of different load. With feature-based matching of photogrammetry and SLS results, we can combine the advantages of the fast global UAV-based image approach and the micrometer-resolution local SLS scans and use them to support each other. In this paper we report about those experiments in detail and analyze them. Based on that, we formulate a possible user story to apply both techniques to support structural health monitoring of bridges and decision-making in maintenance.