Prophecy is an undertaking that always involves risk. The prophet's guess of what the future will bring forth is based only on the tendencies of the past, the most urgent needs of the present, and the activity of his imagination. He may easily—and he usually does—entirely overlook certain possibilities which may arise apparently from nowhere and which profoundly affect the whole trend of development. Conditions which dominate at the present time— such as military necessity—may happily drop into the background and free the science from some of its severest restrictions. With this caution, some future possibilities in apparatus and methods may be presented along the lines already used in discussing the present status of aerial photography.

Lenses

From the military standpoint the next steps in lens design would be toward telephoto lenses on the one hand, and on the other toward lenses of short focus and wide angle. The telephoto lenses used for spotting would be of long equivalent focus—a meter and more—but of handy size, that is, not more than 50 centimeters over all working distance. The wide angle short focus lenses would be designed for low flying reconnaissance or quick mapping work. They would also be demanded for peace-time mapping projects, where the largest possible amount of territory should be covered in a single flight. Both types of lens should be pushed to the extreme in aperture, for short exposures and the maximum of working days will always rfe demanded.

Cameras

Peace-times will give the necessary opportunity to develop self-contained and therefore simply installed cameras. They will at the same time be made very completely automatic but simple to operate in spite of their complexity. Such cameras have, during the war, been the ideal of all aerial photographers, but the time has been too short since the necessary conditions have been understood for that lengthy development work and those complete service tests which are so necessary to develop all automatic apparatus. Several designs which are now being perfected may be counted on to take us a long way toward this ideal.

On the other hand, that military ideal which leaves the camera operator the greatest possible freedom for other activities, is apt to be entirely reversed in peace. The camera operator can now be required to be an expert, who will be free to change plates or filters and to estimate exposures, instead of giving his best efforts to the problem of defence. For him a simple and reliable hand-operated or semi-automatic camera is entirely satisfactory, and the great expense of complicated automatic apparatus has no longer its former justification.

Camera Suspension

Perhaps the most pleasing prospect before the aerial photographer as he turns from war to peace work is that of having planes built for and dedicated primarily to photography. Instead of his camera being relegated to an inaccessible position, picked after the plane design has been officially "locked;" instead of yielding first place to controls, machine gun and ammunition; instead of being jealously criticised for the space and weight it takes up, the camera can now claim space, weight, and location suitable for any likely aerial photographic need. High speed no longer will be vital, and slower planes, permitting longer exposures in inverse ratio to their speed, will be chosen for photographic purposes.

A development which is sure to intrigue many investigators is the gyroscopically controlled camera. This has its chief raison d'etre in precision mapping, whose possibilities from the air will undoubtedly be intensively studied at once. With the automatically leveled camera will come renewed attention to indicators of time, altitude, and direction, with the ultimate goal of producing aerial negatives that show upon their face the exact printing and arranging directions necessary to put together an accurate map.

Sensitive Materials

Manufacturers of plates and films will direct efforts toward producing emulsions cf good contrast, high color sensitiveness and high effective speed, especially when used in conjunction with the filters necessary for haze penetration. Exposure data will be accumulated and exposure meters appropriate for aerial work will be developed.

Color Photography

Color photography from the air by any of the screen-plate or film-pack methods is probably out of the question because of the long exposures required. The screen-plates are unsuitable also because of the relatively large size of their grain compared to the detail of the aerial photograph. Ordinary three-color photography, using three separate negatives, is always subject on the earth's surface to the difficulty that the three negatives must be exposed from the same point of view, either in succession or by means of some optical arrangement which is costly from the standpoint of light. In photographing from the air this difficulty of securing a single point of view for the three photographs is absent. Three matched cameras, side by side in the fuselage, have identical points of view as far as objects on the earth below are in question. Consequently, three-color negatives are entirely possible, and indeed will be simple to make as soon as plates of adequate color sensitiveness and speed are available. Probably the new Ilford panchromatic plate has the necessary qualities.

Night Photography

The searching eye of photography was so omnipresent in the later stages of the Great War that extensive troop movements and other preparations had to be carried out either in photographically impossible weather or else at night. The natural reply to the utilization of the cover of night is to "turn night into day" by proper artificial illumination. At first thought it might well appear that the task of illuminating a whole landscape adequately for airplane photography is well-nigh hopeless by any artificial means. On one hand we have the very short exposures alone permissible; on the other the fact that the intensity of daylight illumination is overwhelmingly greater than those common in the most extravagant forms of artificial illumination.

Toward the close of the war, however, actual experiments made with instantaneous flashes of several million candle-power showed that if proper means were provided to insure the flash going off near the ground, and if its duration were made no longer than about -^q second, interpretable photographs were obtainable on the fastest plates. It appears, therefore, merely a matter of manufacturers perfecting the technique of flash production, and of inventors providing the launching and igniting devices to push this kind of photography to the practical stage. The achievement of night photography cannot fail to have an enormous effect on future tactics.

The technique of night photography may take either of two directions. On one hand we may develop flashes of the requisite intensity to give all their light in second; on the other hand, it may prove more feasible to use flashes of longer duration and to arrange for the camera shutter (of the between-the-lens type) to be exposed synchronously with the middle of the flash. One way, frequently suggested, to use these longer flashes would be to trail the charge on a long wire, through which the ignition is effected electrically. This is not likely to be satisfactory, however, for the resistance of a wire is so great that when the plane flies at any practical height, the trailed flash, if it reaches near the ground, will be forced to a very great distance behind. Probably the best solution will involve accurate synchronizing of the fuse in the freely dropped sack of flash powder with the exposing mechanism in the camera.