Essentially, photography requires:
- A light tight box
- Lenses
- Light sensitive substances
Before their combination, there was knowledge of these three ingredients.
Photography is a word derived from the Greek words photos ("light") and graphein ("to draw"). The word was first used by the scientist Sir John F.W. Herschel in 1839. It is a method of recording images by the action of light, or related radiation, on a sensitive material.
Pinhole Camera – Camera Obscura
Alhazen, a great authority on optics in the Middle Ages who lived around 1000AD, invented the first pinhole camera, (also called the Camera Obscura} and was able to explain why the images were upside down. The first casual reference to the optic laws that made pinhole cameras possible, was observed and noted by Aristotle around 330 BC, who questioned why the sun could make a circular image when it shined through a square hole.
Initially room-sized and with a small opening in a wall it gradually diminished in size and increased in portability. It enabled an inverted image to be seen.
- The daguerreotype - sharp detail; unique image. Produced on a silver plate and can't be reproduced. Only still objects where captures due to exposure of time.
- The calotype - muted tones; negative that could yield multiple copies.
- The photogenic drawing - a contact print; negative that could yield multiple copies.
On a summer day in 1827, Joseph Nicephore Niepce made the first photographic image with a camera obscura. Prior to Niepce people just used the camera obscura for viewing or drawing purposes not for making photographs. Joseph Nicephore Niepce's heliographs or sun prints as they were called were the prototype for the modern photograph, by letting light draw the picture.
Niepce placed an engraving onto a metal plate coated in bitumen, and then exposed it to light. The shadowy areas of the engraving blocked light, but the whiter areas permitted light to react with the chemicals on the plate. When Niepce placed the metal plate in a solvent, gradually an image, until then invisible, appeared. However, Niepce's photograph required eight hours of light exposure to create and after appearing would soon fade away.
Fellow Frenchman, Louis Daguerre was also experimenting to find a way to capture an image, but it would take him another dozen years before Daguerre was able to reduce exposure time to less than 30 minutes and keep the image from disappearing afterwards.
The Birth of Modern Photography
Louis Daguerre was the inventor of the first practical process of photography. In 1829, he formed a partnership with Joseph Nicephore Niepce to improve the process Niepce had developed.
In 1839 after several years of experimentation and Niepce's death, Daguerre developed a more convenient and effective method of photography, naming it after himself - the daguerreotype.
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