For World War One pilots and observers, a crucial part of training was learning how to accurately operate a plane-mounted machine gun, while flying, with moving targets. Of course actually shooting at the other student pilots wouldn't work, so they came up with a solution: camera guns. The camera gun resembled the regular machine guns used on airplanes, but firing the shutter exposed a frame of film (for more details and pictures,
see here). The film would then be developed and the accuracy of the aim could be assessed by the position of the target as captured by the shutter.
The photographs themselves were, of course, not the aim of the endeavour. Exposure, aperture settings, and focus were fixed, and the shots were disposable. I'd actually never seen an example until I stumbled across these images in the collection of the San Diego Air and Space Museum. They come from the personal photographs (possibly in album form; it's unspecified) of an American air force pilot named
Frederick H. Morlan who served and just after during WWI. Apparently he liked them enough to keep them!
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| San Diego Air and Space Museum |
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| San Diego Air and Space Museum |
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| San Diego Air and Space Museum |
Though the camera guns were of course intended only for target practice, pilots sometimes took pictures just for fun. Peter Hart's book on WWI pilots
Aces Falling contains an anecdote of a young pilot who got in trouble for flying where he shouldn't have been... because he took a picture of it!
Source
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| San Diego Air and Space Museum |
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| San Diego Air and Space Museum |
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| San Diego Air and Space Museum |
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| San Diego Air and Space Museum |
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| San Diego Air and Space Museum |
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| San Diego Air and Space Museum |
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| San Diego Air and Space Museum |
An incredibly surreal double exposure.
Source
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