SNIPPET: Aerial photographers like Georg GERSTER (77) have been flying over sites for four decades now to provide archaeologists with the "big picture." Seen from high above, even the most familiar turf can appear transformed, with a coherence and detail invisible on the ground. His recent book, "The Past From Above: Aerial Photographs of Archaeological Sites" (J. Paul GETTY Museum), contains images of places we've seen a thousand times in pictures from ground level which take on a whole new meaning from above. His superb photographs dramatize the scale of ancient structures and show them, as if for the first time, in relation to their surroundings. Some of these photos appear in the December 2005 issue of "Smithsonian" magazine with a story by Andrew CURRY, a Fulbright Journalism Fellow in Berlin -- the Acropolis in Rome; a monastery on Skellig Michael, off the Irish coast, which was occupied as early as the seventh century A.D.; the "shockingly large" Great Wall of ! China, built over two millennia starting in the third century, BC., 4,500 miles long and punctuated by defensive towers every 200 yards; and a personal favorite of mine, that of the beautiful White Horse at Uffington carved into the chalk of Oxfordshire in 1200 BC. Other images in the magazine were taken at sites n Mexico, Iraq, Austria, Syria and Turkey, Apparently his book includes images of Stonehedge, and of the mysterious Nazca lines, some 300 giant figures etched into the desert sanding beginning in 200 BC and located south Lima, Peru. Georg GERSTER, who was born in Switzerland and lives today near Zurich, developed a passion for aerial photography in 1963, when, at 35, he chartered a small plane to photograph Egyptian and Sudanese sites about to be flooded by the construction of the Aswan High Dam. Since then, he has photographed sites in 108 countries and Antarctica, usually while perched in an open doorway of a plane or helicopter. The first known aerial photograph was taken from a balloon in 1858. But not until the invention of the airplane did the idea of photographing ruins become practical. Even then, it was usually a byproduct of military reconnaissance. German pilots documented Egypt's pyramids during WW-I. Between the wars, British military fliers made important advance in aerial photography. Even aviator Charles LINDBERGH made low flights over jungles of Central America in 1929 for search for hidden Maya ruins while his wife, Anne, took photographs. GERSTER's work from the 1960s and 197! 0s have been all the more valuable as some of the sites are inaccessible today, or have been subsequently damaged by war, looting, development and time. The world's precious ruins and these irreplaceable images by GERSTER and others are important portraits of the past.