WW I in photos

[Iga]

Lots of interesting aerial photos.
Pics 7, 39 and 40 show awesome cameras these photos were taken with
http://www.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/wwi/wwiair/

Igor

[Struan Gray]

My wife's grandfather was one of the first to take aerial photographs over the Western Front. He started flying early enough that he lived through the period when pilots from both sides would help each other - he spoke German, and they would share weather reports and other information mid-air. That all ended the day he was given a brick and told to try and drop it through the enemy's wings. The brick turned into a pistol, and then a Lewis gun, and then life wasn't so much fun anymore.

He had to provide his own camera and film, and paid for processing himself. The powers that be thought photographs taken from planes, especially by a pilot in an open cockpit, would be too blurry to be of any use.

[Andrew O'Neill]

Great story, Struan.

[goamules]

More comments today on the same site: http://www.largeformatphotography.info/forum/showthread.php?113831-WW1-in-photographs-one-hundred-years-later

[Iga]

So we hit the same site same day ? Incredible !
Igor.

[goamules]

http://www.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/wwi/wwitech/w_41.jpg

[Struan Gray]

Great story, Struan.

Thanks Andrew.

There is a tendency to talk about the pace of technological development in the Second World War, but overlook the similar rapid developments in the First World War. Photography went from holding cameras one-handed over the side of the cockpit while trying to fly the plane with the other hand, to the specialised aerial cameras and lenses you can see in one of the photos in the OP's link. By the 1920s lenses and techniques had advanced to the point where the limiting factor in resolution for daytime aerial reconnaissance or photogrammetry was the flatness of the glass plates (or film).

My wife's grandfather moved to what is now Iraq before aerial warfare in Europe turned really nasty. He won the MC, but like many did not talk much about his experiences with his family. During WWII he worked ferrying planes from factories to airfields, and piloting freighters around the UK. He was an astronomer in peacetime, but continued to work on and advise aerial photography units, both civilian and military, for the rest of his life. Sadly, he died just before I met my wife and I never met him or had a chance to discuss photography with him.

[W K Longcor]

"The war to end all wars." If only it had ----. Still, wonderful photographs.

[Jac@stafford.net]

As a teenager I walked the roiling surface of Verdun fields and through some underground fortifications before the French and USA corps combed the area around the Douaumont monument to remove unexploded ordinance and close certain underground passages, all to accommodate a visit by Charles de Gaulle.

One could still find fragments of helmets, sometimes unexplored ordinance.

It was traumatizing to the young American I was, but an important experience.

I recommend a visit, and that you look into the low-level windows of of Douaumont which has uncountable skeletal remains of the unknown.