The History of Photography

1. The History of Photography

2. Camera Obi-whata??? • Camera = Latin for “room” • Obscura = Latin for “dark” • Go into a very dark room on a bright day. Make a small hole in a window cover and look at the opposite wall. What do you see? Magic! There in full color and movement will be the world outside the window — upside down! This magic is explained by a simple law of the physical world. Light travels in a straight line and when some of the rays reflected from a bright subject pass through a small hole in thin material they do not scatter but cross and reform as an upside down image on a flat surface held parallel to the hole. This law of optics was known in ancient times. See the next slide for a demonstration…

3. FOR EXAMPLE

4. Mo-Ti • The earliest mention of this type of device was by the Chinese philosopher Mo-Ti (5th century BC). He formally recorded the creation of an inverted image formed by light rays passing through a pinhole into a darkened room. • He called this darkened room a "collecting place" or the "locked treasure room."

5. Eclipse • Aristotle (384-322 BC) understood the optical principle of the camera obscura. He viewed the crescent shape of a partially eclipsed sun projected on the ground through the holes in a sieve, and the gaps between leaves of a plane tree.

6. Johannes Kepler and others • The tenth century Arabian scholar Alhazen of Basra had a portable tent room for solar observation and gave a full account of the principle. In 1490 Leonardo Da Vinci gave two clear descriptions of the camera obscura in his notebooks. Many of the first camera obscuras were large rooms for use in observing a solar eclipse. • The term "camera obscura" was first used by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler in the early 17th century. He used it for astronomical applications and had a portable tent camera for surveying in Upper Austria.

7. From Obscura to Photography • First, the name. We owe the name "Photography" to Sir John Herschel , who first used the term in 1839, the year the photographic process became public. The word is derived from the Greek words for light and writing.

8. Important People to Remember • In the sixteen hundreds Robert Boyle, a founder of the Royal Society, had reported that silver chloride turned dark under exposure, but he appeared to believe that it was caused by exposure to the air, rather than to light. • Angelo Sala, in the early seventeenth century, noticed that powdered nitrate of silver is blackened by the sun. • In 1727 Johann Heinrich Schulze discovered that certain liquids change colour when exposed to light. • At the beginning of the nineteenth century Thomas Wedgwood was conducting experiments; he had successfully captured images, but his silhouettes could not survive, as there was no known method of making the image permanent.

9. Daguerreotypes • The first successful picture was produced in June/July 1827 by Niépce, using material that hardened on exposure to light. This picture required an exposure of eight hours. • On 4 January 1829 Niépce agreed to go into partnership with Louis Daguerre . Niépce died only four years later, but Daguerre continued to experiment. Soon he had discovered a way of developing photographic plates, a process which greatly reduced the exposure time from eight hours down to half an hour. He also discovered that an image could be made permanent by immersing it in salt. • Following a report on this invention by Paul Delaroche , a leading scholar of the day, the French government bought the rights to it in July 1839. Details of the process were made public on 19 August 1839, and Daguerre named it the Daguerreotype.

10. But where are the Negatives? • The earliest paper negative we know of was produced in August 1835 • Named a Calotype, and invented by William Henry Fox Talbot

11. Emulsion and Brewster • Through the invention of the camera obscura, better optics and investigations into photochemistry, the development of photography came into being in the 1830's. These early photographic emulsions were slow, and although pinhole photography was discussed and used in the 1850's by Sir David Brewster it was not until the development of dry plate emulsions in the 1870's that it became practical to record the faint image from a pinhole on to a photographic plate.

12. Emulsion and Brewster

13. Collodion • In 1851 a new era in photography was introduced by Frederick Scott Archer , who introduced the Collodion process. This process was much faster than conventional methods, reducing exposure times to two or three seconds, thus opening up new horizons in photography.

14. But our Negatives aren’t wet! • The wet collodion process, though in its time a great step forward, required a considerable amount of equipment on location. There were various attempts to preserve exposed plates in wet collodion, for development at a more convenient time and place, but these preservatives lessened the sensitivity of the material. It was clear, then, that a dry method was required. It is likely that the difficulties of the process hastened the search for instantaneous photography.

15. Dr. Richard Maddox • The next major step forward came in 1871, when Dr. Richard Maddox discovered a way of using Gelatin (which had been discovered only a few years before) instead of glass as a basis for the photographic plate. This led to the development of the dry plate process. Dry plates could be developed much more quickly than with any previous technique. Initially it was very insensitive compared with existing processes, but it was refined to the extent that the idea of factory-made photographic material was now becoming possible.

16. No, Not Clint Eastwood • Celluloid had been invented in the early eighteen-sixties, and John Carbutt persuaded a manufacturer to produce very thin celluloid as a backing for sensitive material. George Eastman is particularly remembered for introducing flexible film in 1884. Four years later he introduced the box camera, and photography could now reach a much greater number of people.

17. YAY! • If you have any questions please email me at photo.bhs@gmail.com • Good luck on your study guide! • Hint: Not all of the answers will be found in the powerpoint. Search textbooks and as a last resort, the internet. REMEMBER TO USE A RELIABLE SOURCE! Not all information found online is correct!