The History of Photography
From The Camera Obscura to the Digital Camera
History of Photography -The Camera Obscura
Though we generally think of photography beginning in the 19th century the history of photography goes back much farther than that. In fact the principles behind. modern digital photography can be traced back thousands of years when “science” was being formulated by the Hermetics and the later alchemists
It is true that actual photography, defined as the technique of producing permanent ( within a reasonable time frame) images on a prepared surface due to chemical reactions with light and the coating of that surface, was not realized until the 1800’s. However this definition does not include the lens as this is strictly not essential for the production of a photographic image.
The early roots of photography are to be found, not surprisingly, in art. One important hermetic artist and architect was Filippo Brunelleschi who, amongst others pioneered the concept of linear perspective this allowed painters to paint 3D images on 2D canvasses by using the concept of receding lines converging in the distance to create a “vanishing point”
These concept were further developed by the renaissance artists of the 1500’s who developed the so called Camera Obscura, better known to most of us from childhood as the “pinhole camera”
The basic principle behind a camera obscura is that light passes into a closed box via a very small hole which inverts and focuses the light rays on the back face to produce. a crude image of the outside scene.
The camera obscura ( literally dark room) was however not necessarily invented by the renaissance artists, the principle had been understood for perhaps thousands of years previously as it is in fact a natural phenomenon.. But the artists of the 16th century were able to rationalise the concept and by adding lenses in front of the pinhole they were able to get fairly sharp images. By scaling up the camera obscura they were able to uses this technique to project images onto a wall and then trace over them for later painting
History of Photography -Photographic Prints
Getting the images to remain fixed on a medium was not achieved until the 19th century. (Though I have heard arguments that the Turin Shroud was in fact a clever renaissance hoax done using rudimentary photographic techniques !!)
The chemicals and principles to “fix” the images on a medium had been around since the dawn of time, however it was not until Johann Heinrich Schulze, noticed that silver salts became darker when exposed to light that the science of photography took off. Sadly for him he did not think of applying this new found knowledge to photography..but others would.
Later Thomas Wedgwood treated leather with silver salts and was able to produce images of leaves which he placed on the leather and exposed to light. But he was not able to stop the darkening process. In pre digital photography days we would say that he needed to “fix” the image.
Apart from controlling when the fixing process took over the other main challenge was to integrate the camera obscura into the process
In the 1820’s progress was made by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, whilst experimenting with lithography he found a way to to copy engravings onto glass and metal by using the substance bitumen which reacts to light and in 1826 he placed a bitumen coated plate into a camera obscura and was able to produce the earliest photograph know to us entitled “View from the window at le Gras”
Later in the same century Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre joined Niépce and together they worked to “develop” the process. However it was not until 2 years after Niépce’s death that Daguerre discovered that silver iodide was far better than bitumen for the technique and was able to “fix” the image by washing away the silver iodide with salt and water. This process became known as Daguerreotype
In England Talbot had been working on a similar process using silver chloride and created a negative which would later be used to make a print. this process was called calotype..
Later in England Archer produced the collodion process which also produced negatives but here they were made of glass and were much sharper
In America glass negatives were backed with black card to produce an ambrotype image and then tintype which used iron plate instead of glass
The next major advance came in the late 1800’s with the dry plate method, previous techniques had been wet plate and Eastman, the developer of Kodak, applied this technique to dry emulsion paper as opposed to glass resulting in the Kodak camera with the first rolls of film
History of Photography -........
To be continued
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