Photography

Some pioneers of aerial photography:

• Thaddeus Lowe
• Nadar
• Paul Nadar
• Desmaret
• Shadbold
• Triboulet

In the eighties, balloon photography was solely employed for military purposes in England and Germany; and in this connection the names of Elsdale and Templer may be mentioned, as well as those of Tschudi, Hagen, and Sigsfeld. In Austria, the first attempts at photographic work were made by Viktor Silberer, who interested himself in this as in every other aspect of ballooning.

Aerial photography dramatically increased the speed and precision of mapping.

There were some peculiarities for aerial photography due to the way different colors of light can travel at long distances through the atmosphere:

The blue rays are more largely absorbed by the air than the others, and therefore all bright objects appear redder and consequently darker on the plate. An effect of absorption and reflection is that all the bright colours are, as it were, displaced toward the red end of the spectrum and the darker colours appear bluer.

Different kinds of plates were being prepared to compensate for this shift.

Aerial photography gave a new vantage point on warfare, as seen in this image of soldiers in trenches during World War I.

Aerial photographs combined to form a continuous map. "The military and naval authorities of the warring countries have thousands of miles of photographic maps. These are kept up to the minute by the constant stream of aerophotographs brought to headquarters by aviators, where they are developed, studied, and the minutest changes noted on the map." (Textbook of Military Aeronautics (1918), p. 91.)

Enclosing categories	Simple tech terms
Subcategories
Keywords	Military, Instrument
Start year
End year

Links

• Wikipedia: Aerial photography,
• Commons: Photographs by Eduard Spelterini