Pigeon photography

The first aerial photographs were taken in 1858 by the balloonist Nadar; in 1860 James Wallace Black took the oldest surviving aerial photographs, also from a balloon. As photographic techniques made further progress, at the end of the 19th century some pioneers placed cameras in unmanned flying objects. In the 1880s, Arthur Batut experimented with kite aerial photography. Many others followed him, and high-quality photographs of Boston taken with this method by William Abner Eddy in 1896 became famous. Amedee Denisse equipped a rocket with a camera and a parachute in 1888, and Alfred Nobel also used rocket photography in 1897. Homing pigeons were used extensively in the 19th and early 20th centuries, both for civil pigeon post and as war pigeons. In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the famous pigeon post of Paris carried up to 50,000 microfilmed telegrams per pigeon flight from Tours into the besieged capital. Altogether 150,000 individual private telegrams and state dispatches were delivered. In an 1889 experiment of the Imperial Russian Technical Society at Saint Petersburg, the chief of the Russian balloon corps took aerial photographs from a balloon and sent the developed collodion film negatives to the ground by pigeon post. ==Julius Neubronner==

In 1903 Julius Neubronner, an apothecary in the German town of Kronberg near Frankfurt, resumed a practice begun by his father half a century earlier and received prescriptions from a sanatorium in nearby Falkenstein via pigeon post. He delivered urgent medications up to by the same method, and positioned some of his pigeons with his wholesaler in Frankfurt to profit from faster deliveries himself. When one of his pigeons lost its orientation in fog and mysteriously arrived, well-fed, four weeks late, Neubronner was inspired with the playful idea of equipping his pigeons with automatic cameras to trace their paths. This thought led him to merge his two hobbies into a new "double sport" combining carrier pigeon fancying with amateur photography. (Neubronner later learned that his pigeon had been in the custody of a restaurant chef in Wiesbaden.) After successfully testing a Ticka watch camera on a train and while riding a sled, To take an aerial photograph, Neubronner carried a pigeon to a location up to about from its home, where it was equipped with a camera and released. A pneumatic system in the camera controlled the time delay before a photograph was taken. To accommodate the burdened pigeon, the dovecote had a spacious, elastic landing board and a large entry hole. (The rejection was based on a misconception about the carrying capacity of domestic pigeons.) The technology became widely known through Neubronner's participation in the 1909 International Photographic Exhibition in Dresden and the 1909 International Aviation Exhibition in Frankfurt. Spectators in Dresden could watch the arrival of the pigeons, and the aerial photographs they brought back were turned into postcards. Neubronner's photographs won prizes in Dresden as well as at the 1910 and 1911 Paris Air Shows. A photograph of Schlosshotel Kronberg (then called Schloss Friedrichshof after its owner Kaiserin Friedrich) became famous due to its accidental inclusion of the photographer's wing tips. In a breach of copyright it was shown in German cinemas as part of the weekly newsreel in 1929. In a short book published in 1909 Neubronner described five camera models: • The "double camera" described in the patent had two lenses pointing in opposite directions (forward/backward), each with a focal length of 40 mm. Operated by a single focal-plane shutter, the camera could take two simultaneous glass plate exposures at a time determined by the pneumatic system. • A stereoscopic camera had similar characteristics, but both lenses pointed in the same direction. • One model was capable of transporting film and taking several exposures in a row. • One model had its lens fixed to a bag bellows. A scissor mechanism held the bellows in its expanded state until the photo was taken, but condensed it immediately afterwards. This allowed one exposure of size 6 cm × 9 cm on a photographic plate, at a focal length of 85 mm. • In a panoramic camera, the focal-plane shutter was replaced by a rotation of 180° of the lens itself. In a 1920 pamphlet, Neubronner described his last model as weighing slightly more than and being capable of taking 12 exposures. ==First World War==

and darkroom as shown at 1909 exhibitions Neubronner's invention was at least partially motivated by the prospect of military applications. At the time, photographic aerial reconnaissance was possible but cumbersome, as it involved balloons, kites or rockets. the French artillery captain Reynaud solved it by raising the pigeons in an itinerant dovecote. There is no indication that Neubronner was aware of this work, but he knew there must be a solution as he had heard of an itinerant fairground worker who was also a pigeon fancier with a dovecote in his trailer. At the 1909 exhibitions in Dresden and Frankfurt he presented a small carriage that combined a darkroom with a mobile dovecote in flashy colors. In months of laborious work he trained young pigeons to return to the dovecote even after it was displaced. Instead, under the novel conditions of attrition warfare, war pigeons in their traditional role as pigeon post saw a renaissance. Neubronner's mobile dovecote found its way to the Battle of Verdun, where it proved so advantageous that similar facilities were used on a larger scale in the Battle of the Somme. ==Second World War==

Modern technology allows extension of the principle to video cameras. In the 2004 BBC program Animal Camera, Steve Leonard presented spectacular films taken by miniature television cameras attached to eagles, falcons and goshawks, transmitted to a nearby receiver by microwaves. The cameras have a weight of . Miniature digital audio players with built-in video cameras can also be attached to pigeons. In 2009 researchers made news when a peer-reviewed article discussed the insights they gained by attaching cameras to albatrosses. The lipstick-sized cameras took a photo every 30 seconds. ==References==