Monday, January 14, 2013

Nova Scotia From The Air

Farms in Kentville, NS 1931. From the archives
Beautiful images of Canada from the early days of both flight and aerial photography are available from the Nova Scotia online archives. These photos were taken by lunatics photographers with plate-style box cameras hanging out of airplanes. They've been digitized and are just gorgeous, detailing a time that really wasn't that far back.
The farm above looks nothing like my grandfather's farm in Manitoba, but, like his, the farm buildings outshine the house.
From the archives:
It was Harold Reid who took most of the photographs in the McCully aerial collection, while Marty Fraser, an ex-RCMP officer and military pilot, flew the plane. According to author Dan Soucoup, McCully was "convinced that the aviation age would provide great opportunities for exposing people to exciting new ways of seeing the world around them.... In May 1931, a young pilot named Marty Fraser flew Reid as far south as Fundy Bay and up into Kent County, and the result is a fascinating collection of aerial photos that reveal the landscape in wonderful bird's-eye views that capture an age long vanished."2
In the summer of 1931 Reid and Fraser also flew over Nova Scotia, where Reid took equally fascinating photographs — 221 of them survive, in fragile glass-plate negative format, and were acquired in 2012 by the Nova Scotia Archives.
This is really cool stuff, and deserves a look.

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