Aerial photography: how it was done before drones

4 bizarre, dangerous, incredible methods used not so long ago to photograph from above

These days "aerial photography" is synonymous with "drone", or at least the drone is the first image that comes to mind for anyone talking or hearing about pictures taken from a certain distance above the ground. Yet the widespread use of Remotely Piloted Aircraft in photography, as well as for broader civil use, is relatively recent.

So let's take a very quick leap into a past that seems very distant but isn't, and look at 4 expedients once used for aerial photography.

1 - New Military Aircraft

Let's start with the dramatic and recent episode of the two world wars, in the mid-1900s. Innovations in aircraft and cameras met here, on the battlefields of trench warfare. It was in this context that the first spy planes were equipped with reconnaissance cameras.
Aerial images taken from low-flying aircraft were invaluable to the Allied troops during the Normandy landings.

2 - Bavarian Pigeons

Before the outbreak of the first war, the winds of war were already in the air in the form of espionage. In 1903 the photographer Schlosshotel Korenberg designed and built special cameras to be carried by homing pigeons. Incredible as it sounds, they were not much bigger than the modern GoPro and were set up to take photos automatically during the animals' flight. In this way, the Bavarian Pigeons gathered very useful intelligence.

3 - Kites

Fortunately, the human need to see the earth and life from above is not tied only to warfare. The year is 1880, and George Lawrence, together with a couple of friends and collaborators, had the idea of attaching cameras to kites. Imagine the difficulty of taking these shots, having to combine several kites to lift the heavy cameras of the time, and who knows how many problems in post-production, having to literally glue multiple photos together to get a believable panorama. All this in an era when everything was analog and a wasted shot (or several) meant losing entire rolls of film and projects. The result of the ambitious project is this evocative panorama of San Francisco.

4 - Hot Air Balloons

In 1860 a hot air balloon carrying James Wallace Black flew over Boston. From the basket of the craft, he took a marvelous image, the original of which is now held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Seeing the earth from above is, it seems, a timeless need that pays no heed to the limits of the means!
See life from above