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So, I was surfing around about the 1906 Earthquake in San Francisco.  I come upon a WikiPedia page of a photographer that took a high altitude photograph of San Francisco entitled "San Francisco in Ruins".  It has to be among the most incredible pictures I've ever seen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_R._Lawrence


If posting a link like this is a problem I'll delete it, all you need to do is Google it...

I'd like to see what others think of an image created 116 years ago.  Click on the image of San Francisco and then click in to magnify.

The level of detail is shockingly great, simply amazing.


Brian

Very cool to see the level of detail and documentation of the devestation of San Francisco. Thanks for sharing the link, I did not know about Lawrence, kite and balloon photography at that time, who would have thought, and that huge lens.

Yeah, I was unaware of him as well and only stumbled upon the image while looking into the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.  A couple of things really struck me about the photo: first, as mentioned before, the level of detail is simply outstanding and if we were to do this today we'd probably do a panorama to produce an image of several hundred MP or more but this was shot in a single frame 116 years ago and appears to be at least on the order of several hundred MP equivalent; secondly, the image of SF in 1906 was way more modern than I would have imagined just 41 years after the Civil War, the docks are filled with steam ships and the skyline of the city is replete with a significant number of fairly tall buildings.  The last thing that struck me was how sharp and free from motion blur which suggest a fairly fast shutter speed.  Judging by the look of the water in the bay the shutter speed is slower than 1/100 but the images of people moving about and the lack of blurring of them suggests the shutter speed could not have been much slower than 1/20 -- I thought the emulsions of that time would have required several or many seconds exposure.  This guy knew his stuff, I mean he really knew his stuff!

Brian

I completely agree with your observations, which makes it even more surprising that he is not better known.