9.1 How Did Aircraft Photography Develop?

A French photographer named Gaspar Felix Tournachon (known as “Nadar”) took the first aerial photograph. In 1858, Nadar strapped himself into the basket of a hot-air balloon, and captured an image of a landscape outside Paris. This first aerial photograph no longer exists, but this was clearly the beginning of something big. In 1860, aerial photographs were taken of Boston by James W. Black from a balloon above the city (Figure 9.1). However, development times, problems with landing at a prearranged location, and interference with the photographic plates from the balloon’s gas all contributed to the view that balloons were not a practical platform for capturing aerial photographs.

By the end of the nineteenth century, photographic equipment was attached to kites (or a series of kites) and used to photograph the landscape remotely—while the photographer was safely on the ground. A famous example of kite photography comes from 1906, when a photographer named George Lawrence used a set of kites 1000 feet above San Francisco Bay to capture an aerial image of the city, in the wake of the 1906 earthquake: he called it “San Francisco in Ruins” (Figure 9.2). These early images taken from the air set the stage for the use of aircraft as platforms for aerial photography.

The history of modern aviation started in 1903, with the first flight of the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. In 1908, a cameraman took the first photograph from an airplane as he flew with Wilbur Wright near Le Mans, France. During World War I, aerial photography from an airplane was commonly used for mapmaking, and the planning of military tactics. Aerial photography of the battlefields allowed for the patterns of trenches to be determined, enemy positions to be observed, troop movements and encampments to be plotted, and the location of artillery or supplies to be found. Countless aerial photos were shot and developed over the course of the war, and aerial photography opened up new areas in military intelligence. See Figure 9.3 for an example of trench formations captured by an aerial camera.

Aerial photography continued to be extremely important for tactical planning and reconnaissance during World War II. Both the Allies and the Axis forces depended heavily on aerial photography for obtaining vital information about locations prior to military action, and it became a key reconnaissance technique. For instance, a V-2 rocket base in Peenemunde, Germany, was the subject of British aerial photography in June of 1943, and bombing strikes destroyed the base less than two months later. Similarly, aerial reconnaissance was used in obtaining photographs of German dams and the subsequent “dam-busting” bombing missions to destroy them. A huge amount of aerial photography was performed during the war, and a good source of historical imagery is The Aerial Reconnaissance Archives (TARA), currently held at the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), which hosts a large archive of European World War II aerial photos (see Hands-on Application 9.1: World War II Aerial Photography Online for a glimpse of these historic photos).

Post–World War II aerial photography remained critical for military applications, especially for spy planes. The 1950s saw the development of the U-2 spy plane, capable of flying at 70,000 feet, traveling at over 400 mph, and photographing the ground below. The U-2 was used for taking aerial photos over the Soviet Union, but also enabled the acquisition of imagery showing the placement of missile launchers at key points in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 (Figure 9.4). Spy plane technology continued to advance with the development of the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, which could fly at over 80,000 feet and travel at more than three times the speed of sound (Figure 9.5), thus enabling it to go higher and faster than the U-2. The Blackbird was an essential aerial photography plane through the Cold War and beyond, until it was retired in the late 1990s. Today, digital aerial photography (among many other types of remotely sensed data) is obtained by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). These planes are piloted from the ground via remote control and are currently being used by the military for aerial reconnaissance in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are numerous types of UAVs, ranging from smaller drones like the Predator to larger ones such as the RQ-4 Global Hawk (which is planned to eventually replace the U-2 for aerial reconnaissance—see Figure 9.6). Outside of military uses, aerial photography is used extensively by state and local governments or private companies for many different kinds of data collection.