The history of photography

Photography is a word taken from the Greek word photos (light) and graphein (to draw), the word was first used by the scientist Sir John F.W. Herschel in 1839. It’s a method of recording images by the action of light, or related radiation, on a sensitive material. Alhazen is 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 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. One 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. 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 years of experimentation and Niepce's death, Daguerre developed a more convenient and effective method of photography, naming it after himself - the daguerreotype. Daguerre's process 'fixed' the images onto a sheet of silver-plated copper. He polished the silver and coated it in iodine, creating a surface that was sensitive to light. Then, he put the plate in a camera and exposed it for a few minutes. After the image was painted by light, Daguerre bathed the plate in a solution of silver chloride. This process created a lasting image, one that would not change if exposed to light. In 1839, Daguerre and Niepce's son sold the rights for the daguerreotype to the French government and published a booklet describing the process. The daguerreotype gained popularity quickly; by 1850, there were over seventy daguerreotype studios in New York City alone. The inventor of the first negative from which multiple postive prints were made was Henry Fox Talbot, an English botanist and mathematician and a contemporary of Daguerre. Talbot sensitized paper to light with a silver salt solution. He then exposed the paper to light. The background became black, and the subject was rendered in gradations of grey. This was a negative image, and from the paper negative, Talbot made contact prints, reversing the light and shadows to create a detailed picture. In 1841, he perfected this paper-negative process and called it a calotype, Greek for beautiful picture. Tintypes, patented in 1856 by Hamilton Smith, were another medium that heralded the birth of photography. A thin sheet of iron was used to provide a base for light-sensitive material, yielding a positive image. In 1851, Frederick Scoff Archer, an English sculptor, invented the wet plate negative. Using a viscous solution of collodion, he coated glass with light-sensitive silver salts. Because it was glass and not paper, this wet plate created a more stable and detailed negative.

  Photography advanced considerably when sensitized materials could be coated on plate glass. However, wet plates had to be developed quickly before the emulsion dried. In the field this meant carrying along a portable darkroom. 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 so rapidly that the hand-held camera was now possible.  In 1889, George Eastman invented film with a base that was flexible, unbreakable, and could be rolled. Emulsions coated on a cellulose nitrate film base, such as Eastman's, made the mass-produced box camera a reality. In the early 1940s, commercially viable color films (except Kodachrome, introduced in 1935) were brought to the market. These films used the modern technology of dye-coupled colors in which a chemical process connects the three dye layers together to create an apparent color image. By definition a camera is a lightproof object, with a lens, that captures incoming light and directs the light and resulting image towards film (optical camera) or the imaging device (digital camera). All camera technology is based on the law of optics first discovered by Aristotle. By the mid-1500s a sketching device for artists, the camera obscura (dark chamber) was common. The camera obscura was a lightproof box with a pinhole (later lens were used) on one side and a translucent screen on the other. This screen was used for tracing by the artists of the inverted image transmitted through the pinhole. Around 1600, Della Porta reinvented the pinhole camera. Apparently he was the first European to publish any information on the pinhole camera and is sometimes incorrectly credited with its invention. Johannes Kepler was the first person to coin the phrase Camera Obscura in 1604, and in 1609, Kepler further suggested the use of a lens to improve the image projected by a Camera Obscura. The earliest cameras used in the daguerreotype process were made by opticians and instrument makers, or sometimes even by the photographers themselves.

Biography

Elisabeth Rees was born on june 5 1998. Shes really nothing important and she really likes food. Also elisabeth is really lame and doesn’t care about much. Elisabeth has lived in the same place all her life and is also not very talented. She probably couldn’t take pictures right. Shes a real downer. The thing that elisabeth likes most about photography is taking the pictures of things she likes nature and people she cares about even though she doesn’t care. Elisabeth likes nature because its away from people and you can be by yourself and just look at flowers and helpless little bugs like fruit flies. Elisabeth is in grade 12 right now and elisabeth knows that this is all over the place and probably doesn’t even make sence. Elisabeth likes carttons in the morning and also eats a lot of cereal because its good. Elisabeth likes cats and dogs because they are adorable like thank god for cats and dogs. She doesn’t like crowded places like the nechako valley high school and the town itself. Elisbaeth listens to a lot of music that you probably don’t even know exits. Elisabeth could name some but its too much effort. Elisabeth also doesn’t like this projcet so here is some this that elisabeth likes in photo form.

 This is Elisabeth.

 this is a dog. Its cute c: so cute.  this is a dope tattoo