Aerial Photography:

Aerial photography is defined as the science of taking of photograph from a point in the
air for the purpose of making some type of study of the earth surface.

Aerial photography was the first method of remote sensing and even today it is widely
used. The first aerial photograph was taken by a French photographer Gaspard Felix Tournachon
(known as Nadar) in the year 1858 from a captive balloon from an altitude of 1200 feet over
Paris.

Advantages/characteristics of aerial photography:

1. It provides synoptic view i.e. it provides bird eye view of the terrain.
2. It is economic and time saving.
3. It has time freezing ability i.e. it permanently preserves the existing ground conditions at
a particular time.
4. It can provide stereoscopic view of the terrain i.e. three dimensional view.
5. It provides timely information.
6. It is much cheaper than conventional surveying.
7. It is safer than surveying.
8. It is accessible to even remote and difficult areas such as high mountains, dense forests
etc.
9. Worldwide coverage is easily available at different scales.

Disadvantages/limitations of aerial photography:

1. Ground features are difficult to identify or interpret without symbols and are often
obscured by other ground detail as, for example, buildings in wooded areas.
2. It lacks marginal data.
3. It requires more training to interpret than a map.
4. It is costly.
5. Scale is not uniform.
6. Aerial photograph has many distortions such as relief displacement, vertical
exaggeration, tilt etc. Hence distances, directions and areas can’t be measured directly
from aerial photograph without removing these distortions.

Uses of aerial photography:

There are following three uses of aerial photography:

1. Photo interpretation: It involves identifying different natural and man-made features on

aerial photograph such as hills, plateaus, valleys, roads, canals, settlements, forests,
orchards, rivers, lakes etc.

1
 2. Photogrammetry: Photogrammetry is the science of making measurements from aerial
photographs. Different measurements can be made from aerial photographs such as area,
distance, elevation etc.

3. Map making/map updating: Aerial photographs are used for creating new base maps
and also for updating new information on already existing maps.

History of aerial photography:

The first aerial photograph was taken in 1858 by Gaspard Felix Tournachon, known as Nadar,
from a tethered balloon over the Bievre Valley in France. Those photographs no longer exist.
The oldest surviving aerial photograph is this one of Boston, taken by James Wallace Black in
1860, using a tethered balloon.

Kite photography was also common in old days. Arthur Batut was the first to successfully attach
a timer to a camera (consisting of a lit fuse), and attach the camera to a kite. George Lawrence
took photograph of San Francisco six weeks after the devastating earthquake in 1906. The
enormous 49-pound camera was sent to an altitude of 2,000 feet on a train of nine kites, and
tripped by electric wire. The camera took many shots to form panoramic images on negatives
that were 48 inches wide!

In 1903, Julius Neubronner attached small cameras to homing pigeons, with timers set to take a
picture every 30 seconds.

The first photograph from an airplane was taken in 1908 by L. P. Bonvillain, in a plane piloted
by Wilbur Wright in France. A year later, Wilbur Wright also piloted the plane for the first aerial

2
movie, over Italy. Afterwards, aviation photography was put to use for science, mapping, and
military reconnaissance.

Captain Albert Stevens took the first photo that showed the curvature of the earth in 1935 using
the balloon named Explorer II, set an altitude record of 72,395 feet!

The first image from space was taken in 1946, from a V-2 rocket at an altitude of 65 miles. The
CIA's Corona Project (1959-1972) laid the groundwork for satellite imagery by taking
reconnaissance photographs of China and the Soviet Union.

In India the aerial photographs are now taken by National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC). Its
headquarter is in Hyderabad.