General Information on Camera's and WWII;

WW II was not only the greatest armed conflict in the history of mankind - it was also the most documented on film. In the case of the Fifth Air Force each Bombardment Group had some of their bombers equipped with still cameras, When they started a bomb run the camera would make an exposure every three to four seconds on a 150 ft roll of film 9 inches wide. Fifth Bomber Command had a Photo Section with some cinematographers. They would assign one or two of them to a Bombardment Group and they would record the mission on 16 mm movie film. In addition to this an awful lot of the troops carried their own personal cameras. Fellows, like myself, being in a Photo Section had an additional benefit. We were able to get a lot of the mission photos for our personal collections. Since the coming of computers and the internet (World Wide Web) a lot of these personal collections have found their way onto Websites. Also a lot of the 16 mm movie film has found its way onto documentaries on the History Channel and other channels. The second reason you read and see more is that 60 years after the fact more of the surviving Veterans of the Fifth are opening up and talking about their time in the "Green Hell" The "Forgotten Fifth" refers its war time service - when it was a step child of WW II.
All told 7 of our 8 planes were out of commission, and the Sq. would sit idle for several weeks. When we did get resupplied with planes they were the modified low level straffers. Up to that time we were still flying the high level B-25s, which is what we flew in the Bismarck Sea Battle. The 90th B-25s and the 89th A-20s had been modified and they were the stars of the Bismarck Sea Battle. But that's another story. http://www.footnote.com/page/92189301jackheyn/

In the first decades of the 20th century improvements in photographic technology allowed cameras to be carried by rockets, kites, and birds and, by 1909, in aircraft. The military potential of this was obvious and aerial photography was widely used in WWI. It was soon found that vertical views were the most useful but could be difficult to interpret, thus the art-science of photo interpretation was born. In recent years the subject has broadened considerably and is now embraced by the term “remote sensing,” which includes downward-looking observations from earth-orbiting satellites as well as aircraft. This topic is dealt with in a later section, as is multispectral imaging, also pioneered by aerial photographers.
Apart from military surveillance, applications are enormously varied, and include agriculture, archeology, forestry, environmental monitoring, and demographics as well as urban planning, geology, minerals prospecting, and surveillance of all kinds. However, aerial photography is most often used for cartography, where the science of photogrammetry is used to remove the distortions inherent in all photography. This enables accurate dimensions and topography to be derived for mapmaking.
For this, special-purpose, downward-looking, automated mapping cameras were developed that used 9-inch (about 23cm) roll film. Since cartography and surveying use large amounts of film, suppliers made special emulsions, including high-contrast, high-resolution monochrome and color films and infrared-sensitive products to penetrate atmospheric haze. Some of these emulsions were available in smaller formats, and cameras using 70 and 35mm film are also used for aerial photography. Not all such images are intended for mapmaking or for accurate dimensional surveying, so very useful aerial images can be made very conveniently with these smaller formats. Today, film or digital media can be used and operated manually from aircraft or remotely from kites, tethered balloons, or remotely piloted aircraft. Balloons and remotely piloted aircraft can operate at a lower altitude than piloted aircraft, which is a great advantage over residential areas.

Read more: Aerial Photography http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/articles/pages/1109/Aerial-Photography.html#ixzz0Ys9WqWV4
http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/articles/pages/1109/Aerial-Photography.html

James Ej Lj K N Trott