According to the Professional Aerial Photographers Association, the father of aerial photography was French balloonist Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, who photographed Paris from a hot air balloon way back in 1858. Unfortunately, none of his work remains today, and so the title of oldest surviving aerial photograph goes to the picture you see above.
Under the FAA’s remote control guidelines, most photographers and videographers can get away with doing as much UAV photography as they want. Problems arise when you try to turn your aerial photography into a business, as one Minnesota-based company found out earlier this week. Read more…
New Hampshire House of Representatives member Neal Kurk (R) recently backed a bill that plans to ban almost all aerial photography in the state by classifying it as a class A misdemeanor. The bill, HB 619-FN, seems to be aimed at protecting people’s privacy; however, the fact that it specifically excludes government officials from the ban has raised concerns regarding just that. Read more…
From hitchhiking across Africa with a borrowed camera, to photographing some of the world’s hardest to reach places from the air for National Geographic, expedition photographer George Steinmetz has quite a story to tell. And in this video, he’s kind enough to share the details. Read more…
When people test cameras and lenses for resolution, they commonly use special resolution test charts that are filled with black bars of varying lengths and thicknesses. They’re kind of like eye charts, except for cameras instead of eyeballs, and with lines instead of letters.
Well, did you know that in dozens of locations around the United States, there are gigantic resolution test charts on the ground? Read more…
We’ve featured a couple of projects involving cameras strapped to birds recently (see here and here), but photographing with birds is anything but a new idea. It was actually invented a little over a century ago, in 1907, by a German photography pioneer named Julius Neubronner. Read more…
Aerial photography isn’t something just anyone can afford to do; even the “cheaper” systems out there have you spending quite a bit of money to make it happen. Fortunately, a company that goes by the name Rotary Robotics is trying to remedy the situation with a project they’re calling “Drones for Peace.” Read more…
When photographer Robert Johnson of Business Insider was denied so much as a tour of the Alberta Oil Sands, he could have given up. Instead he chose a more… aerial approach, renting a Cessna 172 to secretly photograph the secretive operation from just over 1,000 feet.
The Alberta Oil Sands are the second largest oil deposit in the world behind Saudi Arabia, and some of the pictures, all of which are now up on Flickr, go a long way in showing how huge an operation like this has to be. In fact, it’s a good thing they denied Business Insider access, photos from the ground probably wouldn’t have done the sands nearly as much justice.
This video is actually part of a project called To Catch a Bike Thief — which is trying to raise awareness about and, of course, prevent bike theft. This particular experiment was their way of doing some “aerial surveillance” of the area on a budget, but regardless of whether they achieved that goal, they did get some awesome aerial footage using only some wood, balloons and a fishing line rated at 20lbs. Viewers be advised that there is a little bit of cursing towards the beginning of the video.
Behind the scenes videos, like the one earlier about Dave Hill’s Ford Fusion shoot, typically show off a photographer’s technique, or the challenges he or she faces when trying to get a certain shot. But Aspen-based photographer Tyler Stableford‘s Buckley AirForce Base shoot posed some unique challenges. Few photographers ever get access to this side of things; and even fewer photographers ever have to deal with eight G’s when trying to capture their subjects.
The full series, which you can find on his website, is meant to be more of a photoessay than a collection of random photos. Tyler set out to capture a snippet of these brave, skilled, and secretive men’s world in the sky; and he delivered in spades.
