Photography

Photography has always been a creative activity that I have wanted to try. It is fun to take pictures and be creative, but photography also has a lot of history tied to it. Photography dates back to as early as 330 BCE, when Aristotle was able to explain why sunlight going through a square hole could be reflected as round. Photography was first looked at as a method of recording images by the action of light, or related radiation, on a sensitive material. Alhazen, who lived around 1000 AD, invented the first pinhole camera- also known as the “camera obscura”. In 1827, Joseph Nicephore Niepce, created the first photograph with a pinhole camera. Before this happened, people just used this camera for drawing or tracing images. Joseph’s images were known as heliographs, because he let the sun draw the images. His process was long and somewhat complicated, taking 8 hours to complete an entire image which would fade away quickly. Louis Daguerre, a French man, also experimented with ways to capture images. It took Daguerre a dozen years to find a way to create images in less than 30 minutes, without them fading away afterwards.

Daguerre’s process fixed images onto a silver sheet that was sensitive to light. He then put the silver plate in the camera and after a few minutes a picture was painted by light. After that the plate was put into silver chloride, making the image stay on the plate. In 1839 the rights were sold to the daguerreotype to the French government. It gained popularity quickly and by 1850, there were over 70 studios in New York City alone. There are many processes of photography such as the negative to positive process, wet plate negatives, and dry plate negatives. In 1889, George Eastman invented film for a camera, which made mass produced cameras a reality. In the 1940’s color images were made available. After this discovery, it was not the process of creating the image that was evolving; it was the different types of cameras. The first handheld that became popular after the daguerreotype camera and box camera was the 35mm camera. This allowed the pictures on the film to become enlarged. Next was the Polaroid camera. This camera created images instantly, when the picture was taken it immediately came out onto printed film. After this was a disposable camera, which are still used today. In 1984, Canon released the first ever digital camera. Digital cameras are the most popular types of camera used today, however they are still evolving. It is interesting to see how far this process has come; it leaves me wondering what the future of photography has to hold.

 

"History of Photography and the Camera." About.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 7 Apr. 2014. 
     <http://inventors.about.com/od/pstartinventions/a/stilphotography.htm>.