Drone Aerial Reconnaissance: "Night Photographic Systems" 1974 USAF Air Force Systems Command FR-239

more at http://quickfound.net/

'AFSC STAFF FILM REPORT 239

DEVELOPMENT OF A PHOTOGRAPHIC SYSTEM DESIGNED TO IMPROVE NIGHT RECONNAISSANCE CAPABILITIES OF REMOTELY PILOTED VEHICLES. USE OF INTERACTIVE GRAPHICS TO IMPROVE EFFICIENCY OF WIND TUNNEL TESTING PROGRAMS. USE OF MICROWAVE INTEGRATED CIRCUITS TO REDUCE THE SIZE OF PRESENT ELECTRONIC INTELLIGENCE COLLECTION SYSTEMS. IMPROVED RADAR HOUSINGS FOR MODERN HIGH PERFORMANCE AIRCRAFT.'

Originally a public domain film, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_photography

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Night photography (also called nighttime photography) refers to the activity of capturing images outdoors at night, between dusk and dawn. Night photographers generally have a choice between using artificial lighting and using a long exposure, exposing the shot for seconds, minutes, or even hours in order to give photosensitive film or an image sensor enough time to capture a desirable image. With the progress of high-speed films, higher-sensitivity digital sensors, wide-aperture lenses, and the ever-greater power of urban lights, night photography is increasingly possible using available light...

History

The very long exposure times of early photographic processes didn't mean people didn't try to take photographs at night from quite early on. The development of mechanical clock drives meant cameras attached to telescopes could eventually capture successful images of celestial objects.

The first-known attempt at astronomical photography was by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, inventor of the daguerreotype process which bears his name, who attempted in 1839 to photograph the Moon. Tracking errors in guiding the telescope during the long exposure meant the photograph came out as an indistinct fuzzy spot.

John William Draper, New York University Professor of Chemistry, physician and scientific experimenter managed to make the first successful photograph of the moon a year later on March 23, 1840, taking a 20-minute-long daguerreotype image using a 5-inch (13 cm) reflecting telescope.

The increasing use of street lighting throughout the second half of the 19th century meant it was possible to capture nighttime scenes despite the long exposure times of the equipment of the period.

Developments in illumination, especially through the use of electricity, coincided with the shortening of exposure times. By the beginning of the 20th century newspapers and journals often showed night time views usually of illuminated urban streets or places of amusement such as Coney Island.

In the early 1900s, a few notable photographers, Alfred Stieglitz and William Fraser, began working at night. The first known female night photographer is Jessie Tarbox Beals.[citation needed] The first photographers known to have produced large bodies of work at night were Brassai and Bill Brandt. In 1932, Brassai published Paris de Nuit, a book of black-and-white photographs of the streets of Paris at night. During World War II, British photographer Brandt took advantage of the black-out conditions to photograph the streets of London by moonlight.

Photography at night found several new practitioners in the 1970s, beginning with the black and white photographs that Richard Misrach made of desert flora (1975–77). Joel Meyerowitz made luminous large format color studies of Cape Cod at nightfall which were published in his influential book, Cape Light (1979). Jan Staller’s twilight color photographs (1977–84) of abandoned and derelict parts of New York City captured uncanny visions of the urban landscape lit by the glare of sodium vapor street lights.

By the 1990s, British-born photographer Michael Kenna had established himself as the most commercially successful night photographer. His black-and-white landscapes were most often set between dusk and dawn in locations that included San Francisco, Japan, France, and England. Some of his most memorable projects depict the Ford Motor Company's Rouge River plant, the Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station in the East Midlands in England, and many of the Nazi concentration camps scattered across Germany, France, Belgium, Poland and Austria.

During the beginning of the 21st century, the popularity of digital cameras made it much easier for beginning photographers to understand the complexities of photographing at night. Today, there are hundreds of websites dedicated to night photography...