Vintage Kite Cameras Capture 1900s America
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George R. Lawrence, already a pioneer by the mid-1890s with his method of "flashlight photography" that preceded the invention of flashbulbs, continued to push photographic boundaries by inventing a way to take aerial photographs. His panorama of San Francisco after the city's 1906 earthquake, pictured, was taken by a 49-pound camera carried by multiple kites flying 2,000 feet in the air.