266 pages, 22x28cm, hard cover

ISBN 0-8174-3293-0 

 Small-format aerial photography

principles, techniques and geoscience applications

book, written by James S. Aber, Irene Marzolff, Johannes B. Ries

published in 2010 by Elsevier

 

The 19 chapters constitute a very comprehensive book which could easily extend to others than small formats. The greatest interest is that so many topics related to aerial photography are covered. It gives to each one a first knowledge. It is well illustrated and it reads easily.

If you are a specialist or if you already have the basics in some of the topics you may be disappointed.  The book has tried an encyclopedic way and in fact it is really difficult to manage

 Only to illustrate this, it seems that there is confusion between: side coverage and endlap of aerial pictures by specialized airplanes equipped for photogrammetry, and, the stereoscopic base of a stereoscopic pair of photographs.

Another disappointment is the history of aerial photography which is a collection of various statements, none been checked and verified as historical point of view; it looks like a scholar homework quickly done. Colonel Aimé Laussedat is noted as kite attempts but ignored as the photogrammetry developer whilst photogrammetry is a major topic in aerial picture interpretation.

In other instances it is found also that there is more a bibliographic work than a specialist experience. For 245 pages there are 309 references, excluding those of the authors. Hopefully there are a few chapters like in geoscience where the photographic interpretation is really interesting and handled efficiently.