Gaspard-Félix Tournachon while the basket was aloft, Nadar experienced imaging problems as gas escaped from his balloons. After Nadar invented a gas-proof cotton cover and draped it over his balloon baskets, he was able to capture stable images. He also pioneered the use of artificial lighting in photography, working in the catacombs of Paris. He was the first person to photograph above ground with his balloons, as well as the first to photograph below ground, in the Parisian catacombs.
In 1863, Nadar commissioned the prominent balloonist Eugène Godard to construct an enormous balloon, 60 metres (196 ft) high and with a capacity of 6,000 m3 (210,000 cu ft), and named Le Géant (The Giant), thereby inspiring Jules Verne's Five Weeks in a Balloon. Le Géant was badly damaged at the end of its second flight, leading Nadar to the conviction that heavier-than-air machines would be more successful. Later, "The Society for the Encouragement of Aerial Locomotion by Means of Heavier than Air Machines" was established, with Nadar as president and Verne as secretary. Nadar was the inspiration for the character of Michael Ardan in Verne's From the Earth to the Moon.
On his visit to Brussels with Le Géant, on 26 September 1864, Nadar erected mobile barriers to keep the crowd at a safe distance. Crowd control barriers are still known in Belgium as Nadar barriers.
During the Siege of Paris in 1870–71 Nadar was instrumental in organising balloon flights carrying mail to reconnect the besieged Parisians with the rest of the world, thus establishing the world's first airmail service.
In April 1874, he lent his photo studio to a group of painters to present the first exhibition of the Impressionists. He photographed Victor Hugo on his death-bed in 1885. He is credited with having published (in 1886) the first photo-interview (of famous chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, then a centenarian), and also took erotic photographs. From 1895 until his return to Paris in 1909, the Nadar photo studio was in Marseilles.
Nadar died in 1910, aged 89. He was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. The studio continued under the direction of his son and long-term collaborator, Paul Nadar (1856 - 1939).
Towards the end of his life, Nadar published Quand j’étais photographe, which was translated into English and published by MIT press in 2015. The book is full of both anecdotes and samples of his photography, including many portraits of recognizable names.
Mikhail Bakunin
Caricature of Balzac, 1850
Charles Baudelaire
Hector Berlioz
Sarah Bernhardt
Georges Boulanger
Marguerite Brésil
Le Bris and his flying machine, Albatros II
Georges Clemenceau
Camille Corot
Gustave Courbet
The future painter Charles Crodel, 1905
Charles-François Daubigny
Claude Debussy
Eugène Delacroix
Gustave Doré (1859)

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