The first aerial photograph shot in Canada was taken over the Halifax Citadel in 1883, when Captain Henry Elsdale of the Royal Engineers attached a camera to a small balloon and sent it upwards. The camera was fitted with a time-sensitive automatic shutter release which enabled it to work at various heights, and at least one vertical photograph taken that day still exists, showing the Citadel from about 1450 feet.
And today? What are we photographing from the air?
"Scientists have discovered that ancient cities really did exist in the Amazon. And while urban ruins remain extremely difficult to find in thick, remote forests, a key technology has helped change the game. Perched in a helicopter some 650 feet up, scientists used light-based remote sensing technology (lidar) to digitally deforest the canopy and identify the ancient ruins of a vast urban settlement around Llanos de Mojos in the Bolivian Amazon that was abandoned some 600 years ago. The new images reveal, in detail, a stronghold of the socially complex Casarabe Culture (500-1400 C.E.) with urban centers boasting monumental platform and pyramid architecture. Raised causeways connected a constellation of suburban-like settlements, which stretched for miles across a landscape that was shaped by a massive water control and distribution system with reservoirs and canals.
The site,described this week in Nature, is the most striking discovery to suggest that the Amazon’s rainforest ‘wilderness’ was actually heavily populated, and in places quite urbanized, for many centuries before recorded history of the region began. From the Smithsonian
Those are the professionally curious explorers. Each of us looks at the passing landscape on an airplane flight, There's a web app that guides you through the landscape you are flying over. Gregory Dicum, the inventor, said he's currently working on getting his "Mondo Window" installed on planes so that you can get information about what you're seeing below on your airplane console as you're flying.
There's something special about a formal bench in the woods.
