Photography an art form began in the late 1830s in france and became publicly recognised ten years later.
Before photography was first created people started to experiment and figure out the basic principles of lenses and the camera. They were able to project the image on the wall or piece of paper, however at that specific point in time no printing was possible at all. A Camera Obscura is what people used to process their pictures in which they took. The Camera Obscura was invented around 13-14th centuries and it is essentially a dark, closed space in the shape of a box with a hole on one side of it. The hole has to be small enough in proportion to the box to make the camera obscura work properly. Light coming in through a tiny hole transforms and creates an image on the surface that it meets, like the wall of the box.
The first photograph was taken in 1825 by a French inventor Joseph Nicéphora niépce. His photograph show a view from a window at Le Gras.
The exposure had to last for eight hours, so the sun in the picture had time to move from east to west appearing to shine on both sides of the building in the picture. This lead to the photograph being more interesting for one to analysis and look at.
Colour photography was explored throughout the 19th century, but didn’t become truly commercially viable until the middle of the 20th century. Before this colour in photographs wouldn’t last for a long amount of time a would start to fade very quickly to become degraded. Several methods of color photography were patented from 1862 by two French inventors: Louis Ducos du Hauron and Charlec Cros, working independently.
The first color photo of an image of a tartan ribbon (shown above), was taken in 1861 by the famous Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who was famous for his work with electromagnetism. Although his work had great influence on the photo industry, Maxwell is not remembered for this as his inventions in the field of physics were more remembered than his photography accomplishment.
The first ever picture to have a person in it was Boulevard du Temple by Louis Daguerre, taken in 1838. However the exposure lasted for about 10 minutes at the time, so it was barely possible for the camera to capture a person on the busy street.
