First aerial photograph

The first person to take an aerial photograph was Nadar, aka Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (France, 1820–1910), who in 1858 photographed the French village of Petit-Bicêtre (Petit-Clamart) from an air balloon tethered at an altitude of 80 m (262 ft). The collodion wet-plate process Nadar used necessitated the use of a portable darkroom, which had to be carried the basket of the balloon. Sadly, none of these earliest aerial shots survive. The oldest aerial photograph in existence is a shot of Boston in Massachusetts, USA, taken from a balloon in 1860 by James Wallace Black (USA).

Nadar also famously took aerial shots of Paris, the oldest-surviving example of which shows the Arc de Triomphe and the Grand Boulevards and dates to 1866, by which time the photography pioneer had changed to a dry-plate technique.