History of Photography
It could be said that photography
was not “invented”…
but that it evolved over time.
The word “Photography” was first used in
1839. It was coined by Sir John Herschel.
It comes from the Greek words “phos”
meaning LIGHT and “graphein” which
mean TO WRITE.
• The pinhole camera or the CAMERA
OBSCUREA (Dark Chamber) can be traced back
to the Greeks and Chinese as early as the 4th
centuries.
• Artist used the CAMERA OBSCUREA to create
more accurate drawings/paintings.
In the 1500s many artists, including Michelangelo and
Leonardo da Vinci, used the "camera obscura" to help them
draw pictures. A person or object would be outside the dark
room and their image was reflected on a piece of paper
and the artist would trace it.
The camera obscura was made portable by the
1700s by putting it in a box with a pinhole on one
side and a glass screen on the other. Light coming
through this pinhole projected an image onto the
glass screen, where the artist could easily trace it
by hand. Artists soon discovered that they could
obtain an even sharper image by using a small
lens in place of the pinhole.
• In 1727 a German
professor, Johann
Heinrich Schulze,
observed that
silver salts
darkened when
exposed to light.
But the idea of
making pictures
using this
information did not
occur to him. That
invention required
the talents of a
later generation of
scientists.
The birth of photography happened in 1826
when a French scientist, Joseph Nicephore
Niepce, put a metal plate coated with
bitumen (a tarlike material) in a camera
obscura. The Bitumen would harden when
exposed to light. The unhardened material
was washed away making a negative image
which was then printed using ink. His first
photograph was latter destroyed. His
earliest remaining photograph he did by
placing his camera obscura facing his
house for eight hours.
DAGUERREOTYPE
• Made by Louis Daguerre in 1835
• The first practical photographic process
• The Process
– Highly polished silver-plated copper sheet exposed to
iodine vapor.
– The Latent image would appear by heating the sheet
with hot mercury fumes. (Latent Image means you
can’t see the image until it is developed)
– Remaining light-sensitive particles were removed
“fixed” with a hot salt solution.
• Pros of the Process
• Greater sensitivity to light
• Shorter exposure times 3-15 min
• Clearer images
• Cons of the Process
• Very expensive
• Complicated
• Images would oxidize in the air, must be kept in a sealed
case.
Still Life in Studio 1837 Daguerre
Robert Cornelius, self-portrait, Oct. or Nov. 1839,
approximate quarter plate daguerreotype. The back
reads, "The first light picture ever taken." This selfportrait is the first photographic portrait image of a
human ever produced
Portraiture
• People had to sit for 6 to 10 minutes for an
exposure to be made.
• Bright Sun
• Head clamp
• One sitter recalled the ordeal:
• "(He sat) for eight minutes, with strong
sunlight shining on his face and tears trickling
down his cheeks while...the operator
promenaded the room with watch in hand,
calling out the time every five seconds, until
the fountains of his eyes were dry."
CALOTYPE & TALBOTYPE
• William Fox Talbot of England. 1835
• The Process
– Paper coated with silver chloride.
– The paper negative was waxed to make it translucent.
– Another sheet of sensitized paper was placed under
the waxed negative and exposed with a bright light.
– When the right density was reached, the paper was
fixed, washed, and dried.
– Duplicate prints could be made.
• Talbot’s process of making a positive print from a
negative is the basis of modern photography.
• Pros
– Could make multiple prints from a negative
• Cons
– The prints were not as good as the daguerreotypes.
– The lower quality was caused by the grain or texture
of the paper negative. This defect was transmitted to
the print.
Window in the South Gallery of Lacock Abbey made
from the oldest photographic negative in existence
Henry Fox Talbot 1835
WET PLATE/WET COLLODION
• Invented by Frederick Scott Archer, and English sculptor in
1851.
• The Process.
– Glass coated with light-sensitive sliver salts (Collodion was a
plastic-like substance containing potassium iodide)
– When the collodion had dried to a “tacky” state, a bath in silver
nitrate sensitized it to light.
– The wet plate was loaded into the camera and exposed
immediately.
– Exposed plates also had to be developed, fixed, and washed
immediately.
– If the colodion dried before the sequence was completed, it
became water-resistant and could not be developed.
• Pros
– Created a more stable and detailed negative
(Unlimited Prints).
– Could record fine detail and register slight
differences in tone (Sharper).
• Cons
– Had to be developed quickly before the emulsion
dried. Could only do one exposure at a time, then
immediately develop.
– In the field this meant having taking a portable
darkroom everywhere with you.
This
photograph
shows a typical
field setup of
the Civil War
era. The wagon
carried
chemicals, glass
plates, and
negatives - the
buggy used as a
field darkroom.
An old deteriorated wet plate featuring Theodore
Roosevelt
Glass Negatives: the Collodion Wet Plate
State Archives of Florida
A portable photography studio in 19th century Ireland.
DRY PLATE PROCESS
• 1871 Richard L. Maddox, a British physician
• The Process
– Replace the “wet” collodion coat with a thin
coating of gelatin and silver nitrate.
– The gelatin/nitrate was dryed and retained its
sensitivity to light for some time.
DRY PLATE PROCESS
• In 1879, the dry plate was invented, a glass
negative plate with a dried gelatin emulsion.
Dry plates could be stored for a period of
time. Photographers no longer needed
portable darkrooms and could now hire
technicians to develop their photographs. Dry
processes absorbed light quickly and so
rapidly that the hand-held camera was now
possible.
• Pros
– The plate taken could be developed anytime after
exposure.
– The cumbersome, portable darkroom was no longer
needed.
– This advancement make the commercial manufacture
of photographic plates possible.
• Cons
– Still big and bulky.
– Still not available to the average person.
Example of a Dry Plate Photograph
Leonard Dakin 1887
• In 1888 George Eastman introduced a 100-shot
box camera (The Kodak Brownie).
• The camera and film were returned to Eastman
for processing.
• The camera and the new prints were then
returned. The camera was also reloaded, ready
to take another 100 prints.
• Eastman launched the sale of the camera with
the slogan, “You press the button, we do the
rest.”
• Eastman also introduced his trademark name
Kodak. Kodak was a word that Eastman came up
with. It started and ended with his favorite letter
K.
• In 1889, Eastman replaced the paper backing
with a clear, flexible, celluloid film.
• Prints were easier to make because the gelatin
did not have to be stripped from the backing
to make the print.
• Mr. Eastman wanted
everybody to be able
to take photographs.
He worked hard to
develop a camera that
everybody could
afford to buy. He did it
in 1900. It was the
Kodak Brownie box
roll-film camera. It
cost $1.00. Now
everyone could take
photographs, not
just professional
photographers.
The Brownie
Photograph taken with a
Brownie camera. Notice how
the photograph is round, just
The Kodak Brownie was the first
like the opening in the
one time user camera (kind of
camera.
like a disposable camera today).
Color Photographs
• People had tried to make color photographs
since 1860. It wasn't until 1906 that a film
sensitive to all colors called "panchromatic
film" was produced. You had to take three
separate negatives and then use a special
viewer so you could see all three slides layed
on top of each other.
The first color plates were invented in 1907
by Auguste and Louis Lumiere. They named
it Autochrome. The colors appeared in
delicate pastel.
The Magic Lantern - Lantern Slide
Birth of “motion” pictures
• Leland Stanford
unwittingly started a
chain of events that
contributed to the
development of
motion pictures. To
settle a wager
regarding the position
of a trotting horse's
legs, he sent for
Eadweard Muybridge,
a British photographer
who had recently been
acclaimed for his
photographs of
Yosemite.
• Although Muybridge initially considered the
task impossible, he made history when he
arranged 12 cameras alongside a race track.
Each was fitted with a shutter working at a
speed he claimed to be "less than the twothousandth part of a second." Strings
attached to electric switches were stretched
across the track; the horse, rushing past,
breasted the strings and broke them, one
after the other; the shutters were released by
an electromagnetic control, and a series of
negatives made.
• Though the photographs were
hardly more than silhouettes,
they clearly showed that the
feet of the horse were all off
the ground at one phase of
the gallop. Moreover, to the
surprise of the world, the feet
were bunched together under
the belly. None of the horses
photographed showed the
"hobbyhorse attitude" - front
legs stretched forward and
hind legs backward -so
traditional in painting. The
photos were widely published
in America and Europe.
The Scientific American printed eighteen drawings from Muybridge's
photographs on the first page of its October 19, 1878 issue. Readers were
invited to paste the pictures on strips and to view them in the popular toy known
as the zoetrope, a precursor of motion pictures. It was an open drum with slits
in its side, mounted horizontally on a spindle so it could be twirled. Drawings
showing successive phases of action placed inside the drum and viewed
through the slits were seen one after the other, so quickly that the images
merged in the mind to produce the illusion of motion.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Muybridge_r
ace_horse_animated.gif
• The flashbulb was invented in the 1930.
• Polaroid instant photographs in 1947 by
Edwin Land
• 1986 Fuji introduced the disposable camera
• 1984 Canon demonstrated the first digital
electronic still camera
Digital Photography
How it came to be
A step towards Digital
• Television plays a part in the development of
digital photography.
• In 1952 the first video tape recorders were
used to record TV programs. Before this, most
television was either live, or was a broadcast
movie.
With video tape an image was recorded, not as
an image in itself, but as a coded signal
(Electrical Impulses “Digital”) onto magnetic
tape.
Later that coded tape was run through a
decoding machine (I.E. a video tape player)
and the machine converted the coded signal
back into pictures.
Why is video tape
so important?
• It is the start of recording an
image in as a coded signal
• Find an old cinema reel and you’ll see the
different frames with an actual image on
them.
• Find an old cassette tape and you’ll see
nothing. It needs to be decoded for you first.
• Developed Film and you see an image.
• Memory card, you can’t see the image. It
needs to be decoded first.
The Scanner
1957
• A scanner doesn't actually take pictures, but
they do copy an image already created.
Why this is important/The new technology.
• Scanners can pick up the different intensities
of light and shade in a pictures as save them
as a binary, i.e. digital signal.
What does space
have to do with
digital photography?
Sputnik
1957
Jump-started the US into
doing everything they
could to compete, on every
level they could think of.
What do satellites do?
•They “spy on the
enemy”.
•Take pictures of
earth and space.
• Satellites could have a camera
• Cameras could spy on the enemy
• No Film developers in space
• Must send film back to Earth
somehow, or no pictures
Digital Cameras were the answerer
• Record photographs and “beam”
the digital signal back to Earth.
• The signal was then decoded and
the images could be viewed.
Charge-Coupled Device CCD
• In 1969 George Smith and Willard Boyle
experimented with computer memory chips at
Bell Labs.
• They developed the first CCD.
• CCD: A sensitive integrated circuit for storing
image signals based on the color spectrum.
Color on a Computer
• Computers began implementing digital
technology in the late 1970.
• Images began using tiny cells of tone and color
called…Pixels.
• Pixel is a computer term that is short for the
words “picture elements” and describes the
thousands to millions of individual dots of
light that produce digital images
• The resolution of an image is determined by
pixel density-the grater the density of pixels,
the more memory the images required to
process.
• So as computers evolved to process greater
amounts of information, so too did image
resolution increase.
• Modern digital cameras use designations such
as dynamic range and megapixel to describe
the maximum resolution the camera can
record images at.
1973
• Steven Sasson working for Kodak used a CCD
to produce an digital image
• Camera weighed 8 Pounds
• .1 Megapixel
Sony’s Mavica 1981
• Magnetic Video Cam
• Recorded analog images on two-inch floppy disks
and played them back on a TV set or Video
monitor.
• The Mavica was not a digital camera, but a still
analog version of video cameras of the time.
• .3 Megapixel, not good enough to print
• Could use more then one floppy disk
– 1MB 25 photos
1987 DCS
• Kodak scientists first megapixel sensor
• Professional Digital Camera System (DCS) 1.3
megapixel sensor
Apple: digital camera into homes
• Before 1994 digital cameras were only used by
professional photographers and others who
worked with the print and media industry.
• In 1994 Apple brought digital cameras into the
lives of consumers for their use.
• Introduced a color digital cameras 640x480pixel
CCD and fixed focus 50mm lens, called Quick Take
100
• Great step, but had drawbacks.
– Only could story 8 images.
– Quality mediocre.
Olympus
• Memory Cards
• 1-6 minutes to download
Ricoh
• 1995 first camera to take moving images with
sound recording and still images
• Movies could only be 10 seconds long
1995
• Kodak introduced a digital camera that took
low resolution images and was quite
expensive at $995
1998
Sony Cybershot
• Laser Technology to record JPEG on small
plastic discs
Fuji
• SmartMedia: memory cards credit card sized
1999
• First Internet Photography site to allow people
to load photos directly from a digital camera
to a website.
• Nikon first introduced cameras with 2
megapixel ability for consumers
2002
• Foveon new image sensor. Can record
different colors on each individual photosite.
Before it could only do one color.
Digital catches up to Film
• 2003 Canon Rebel: First affordable digital SLR
– 6.3 Megapixels
– Interchangeable Lens
• 2004 Nikon D70
• Quality keeps going up, and prices go down.
• It is hard now to find a 3 megapixel camera,
even in a Phone.
It could be said that
photography was not
“invented”…
but that it evolved over
time.
Photography will continue to
evolve…
What do you think will be
the next step?