Photography originally started in 1839 by members of the French Académie des Sciences.

Camera obscura and pinhole photography:

The Camera Obscura was essentially the first ‘camera’ as it was a room with a hole in it. During the second half of the 16th century it became very popular as it aids drawings and paintings, even though the earliest use of the camera obscura dates back to around 400 BC. The camera obscura worked by blacking out the room, only having a single hole to allow the light through. As the light flowed in to the black-out room, the view from outside was projected on to the walls. However, the image was projected upside-down as there wasn’t a mirror, like in a camera, to flip it around.

The camera obscura aided the creation of pinhole photography and the pinhole camera in 1811. The pinhole camera consisted of a lightproof box, an aperture and light-sensitive material. When the shutter is opened light passes through the pinhole (aperture), projecting an inverted image on to a piece of film or paper which was on the opposite side of the camera. The image produced by the pinhole camera was inverted and smaller but it was real. The pinhole camera relied on light traveling in straight lines, which is why the image projected appeared upside down.

Nicephore Niepce & heliography:

Nicephore Niepce was a French inventor, born in 1765 and died in 1833. He invented heliography (which he called sun drawings) in 1827, this is the first known permanent photograph taken from a nature scene called ‘ View from the Window at Le Gras’. In 1813, lithography became fashionable in France which got Nicephore Niepce to start experimenting with printing techniques. He used many different light sensitive substances to cover pewter in hopes that the sunlight would engrave an image on the light sensitive material. Following his success in 1822 of engraving an mage on glass, Niepce decided he wanted to try and produce a permanent image by using a camera and a metal pewter plate. To produce the permanent image Niepce used a light-tight box with a hole in it (a pinhole camera). He then prepared a polished pewter plate coated with light-sensitive bitumen of Judea because he knew that it hardened when exposed to light, and placed it in the camera obscura. Later on, Niepce created another heliograph which solved the problem of reproducing nature by light and created the first photomechanical reproduction process.

Louis Daguerre & daguerreotype:

Following on from heliography, Louis Daguerre invented the daguerreotype in January 1839 as Niepce was unable to reduce the problem of having long exposure times when producing his images. The daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic process which was mainly used to take portraits but was also used to produce landscape images. Daguerreotypes were only used by the wealthy people as they were able to afford to have their portrait taken. The process of making a daguerreotype was long ,the images were fixed on to a mirrored metal plate that consisted of s copper plated sheet coated with a sheet of silver. The silver plate was polished and cleaned to look like a mirror which is why the Daguerreotype was known as a ‘mirror with a memory.’ Once the plate was exposed to light it was developed over hot mercury, so light was shining back through the plate, until an image appeared. The silver grains would sit up on the surface which, made the image feel ‘alive’. The only problem with the daguerreotype was that you couldn’t reproduce the image.

In 1838, Louis Daguerre took ‘The Boulevard du Temple’ which is one of the very first daguerreotypes. Within the image you can only see two figures. This is because they were the only two subjects who were in the same position, for the seven minutes, while the image was being taken. As a long exposure was needed nothing else appeared on the busy Boulevard du Temple.

Henry Fox Talbot & calotype:

Shortly after the daguerreotype, Henry Fox Talbot invented the calotype in the autumn of 1840. Henry Fox Talbot was an English inventor, born in 1800 and died in 1877. The calotype was the first negative to positive photographic technology, where the negatives that were produced are then turned into a positive image. The process involved using a paper negative to make a print with a softer, less sharp image than a daguerreotype. Henry Fox Talbot experimented with silver nitrate and potassium iodine solution on paper, when exposed to light an image was produced. Talbot fixed the problem with the log exposure times needed for an image to be produced as the camera only took two minutes to produce the image. Unlike the daguerreotype you were able to produce a copy of the image this is because negatives were produced.

Robert Cornelius & self portraiture:

In 1939 Robert Cornelius designed the first photographic plate for the first image taken in the United States which was an image of Central High School, taken by Joseph Saxton and his self image taken in 1839 was first photographic portrait taken in the United States. Cornelius stood in front of a makeshift camera with a lens made from an opera glass in his yard. The daylight had been assessed and approved by Cornelius so, that it fulfilled the requirements for his prepared metal plate. As the photo was being taken Robert Cornelius had to be motionless for around ten to fifteen minutes.

Julia Margaret Cameron & Pictorialism:

After Robert Cornelius’ self portrait, portraiture photography started to take off. Julia Margaret Cameron was a British photographer who is considered to be one of the most important portraitists of the 19th century. Cameron was a involved in the pictorialism movement as her photos were inspired by the sublime and beauty. Julia Margaret Cameron’s style of photography was taking close-up portraits, with soft focus and dramatic lighting. Most of Cameron’s portraits were of famous Victorian men, she wanted to capture the beauty in men and women. When choosing her female subjects she chose them for their beauty, which links back to pictorialism as she emphasizes the raw and natural beauty of her subjects rather than using them as a form of documentation photography.

Henry Mullins & Carte-de-Visite:

In the 1840’s studio photography was introduced, photography became more about the money, rather than the love of taking photos as people would take photos for commercials. One of the most popular studio photographers in the 1850’s was Henry Mullins. Mullins would take portraits of people based off of their social hierarchy and class in his studio, that he set up when he moved to Jersey in July 1848. His studio was known as the ‘Royal Saloon’. Mullins made four albums from his portraits, ordering them in social hierarchy, with the highest social class being at the start of the album. Henry Mullins specialised in carte-de-visite which was a small photograph on a piece of visit card.

Bibliography:

https://vimeo.com/266412730

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinhole_camera

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliography

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nicephore-Niepce

https://www.loc.gov/collections/daguerreotypes/articles-and-essays/the-daguerreotype-

medium/#:~:text=The%20daguerreotype%20is%20a%20direct,surface%20looked%20like%20a%20mirror.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Fox_Talbot

https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2022/07/robert-cornelius-and-the-first-selfie/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Margaret_Cameron

https://www.theislandwiki.org/index.php/Henry_Mullins

Photo shoot 1, experimenting with rembrandt and butterfly lighting.

Selecting best images

• I selected all the images from the shoot and went to develop
• from here, I flagged the images as pick (images I want) and reject (images I didn’t want)

The Camera Obscura

The camera obscura, from the Latin meaning ‘dark
chamber’, was one of the inventions that led to
photography. The camera obscura has been a source of
fascination to people for hundreds of years; originally used
to observe solar eclipses safely, they were recognised as
an aid to drawing in the 15th Century, and by the 19th
Century they had become popular seaside attractions,
much as binoculars are today. Some of these seaside
cameras obscura’s still exist.

The first camera obscura was simply a small hole in one
wall of a darkened room or tent. Light passing through
the hole formed an inverted (upside down) image of the
outside scene on a white screen placed across the room
from the hole. Artists made use of the camera obscura,
realising that they could trace the outlines of buildings,
trees, shadows and animals to aid in the creation of their
paintings.

The Pinhole Camera

The pinhole has played an important role in the evolution
of the modern camera. Pinhole photography is lensless
photography – a method of capturing images using a
simple light-tight box with a single pinhole in one end.
A piece of opaque tape or cardboard can serve as a
shutter. Film or photo-paper is taped inside and the
camera secured on a stable platform or tripod, exposure
is calculated and the shutter opened. After the shutter is
closed the camera is taken in

Nicephore Niepce & Heliography

Niépce developed heliography, a technique he used to create the world’s oldest surviving product of a photographic process: a print made from a photoengraved printing plate in 1825. In 1826 or 1827, he used a primitive camera to produce the oldest surviving photograph of a real-world scene.

Motivated by the growing popular demand for affordable pictures, Niépce’s photographic experiments were conducted with the dual aims of copying prints and recording scenes from real life in the camera. At his family estate in the nearby village of Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, he produced legible but fleeting camera pictures in 1816. Over the next decade he tried an array of chemicals, materials, and techniques to advance the process he ultimately called héliographie, or ‘sun writing.’

How did Niecpe do it?

To make the heliograph, Niépce dissolved light-sensitive bitumen in oil of lavender and applied a thin coating over a polished pewter plate. He inserted the plate into a camera obscura and positioned it near a window in his second-story workroom. After several days of exposure to sunlight, the plate yielded an impression of the courtyard, outbuildings, and trees outside.

The process of Heliography: 

1. The naturally occurring asphalt bitumen, is applied as a coating on glass or metal 
2. This chemical then hardens in relation to the light exposure available 
3. The plate is then washed with oil of lavender 
4. After washing with oil, the only area remaining would be the hardened area where the image formed. 

Louis Daguerre & Daguerreotype

In 1826, when Joseph-Nicephore Niepce took the world first photograph, it took eight hours to expose. Little more than ten years later, his associate Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre devised a way to permanently reproduce an image, and his picture—a daguerreotype—needed just twenty minutes’ exposure. A practical process of photography was born.

In January of 1839, the invention of a photographic system that would fix the image caught in the camera obscura was formally announced in the London periodical The Athenaeum.

Louis Daguerre called his invention “daguerreotype.” His method, which he disclosed to the public late in the summer of 1839, consisted of treating silver-plated copper sheets with iodine to make them sensitive to light, then exposing them in a camera and “developing” the images with warm mercury vapor. The fumes from the mercury vapor combined with the silver to produce an image. The plate was washed with a saline solution to prevent further exposure.

Boulevard du Temple, Paris, 3rd arrondissement, a street scene captured in a Daguerreotype in either 1838 or 1839. Believed to be the earliest photograph showing a living person. It is a view of a busy street, but because the exposure time was at least ten minutes the moving traffic left no trace. Only the two men near the bottom left corner, one apparently having his boots polished by the other, stayed in one place long enough to be visible. (Louis Daguerre)

Henry Fox Talbot & Calotype

William Henry Fox Talbot was credited as the British inventor of photography. In 1834 he discovered how to make and fix images through the action of light and chemistry on paper. These ‘negatives’ could be used to make multiple prints and this process revolutionised image making.

WHAT IS THE CALOTYPE?

In this technique, a sheet of paper coated with silver chloride was exposed to light in a camera obscura those areas hit by light became dark in tone, yielding a negative image. The revolutionary aspect of the process lay in Talbot’s discovery of a chemical (gallic acid) that could be used to “develop” the image on the paper—i.e., accelerate the silver chloride’s chemical reaction to the light it had been exposed to. The developing process permitted much shorter exposure times in the camera, down from one hour to one minute.

The developed image on the paper was fixed with sodium hyposulfite. The “negative,” as Talbot called it, could yield any number of positive images by simple contact printing upon another piece of sensitized paper. Talbot’s process was superior in this respect to the daguerreotype, which yielded a single positive image on metal that could not be duplicated. Talbot patented his process in 1841.

Robert Cornelius & self-portraiture

A self-portrait is a representation of an artist that is drawn, painted, photographed, or sculpted by that artist (a selfie).

The image above was taken in 1839 by an amateur chemist and photography enthusiast from Philadelphia named Robert Cornelius. Cornelius had set his camera up at the back of the family store in Philadelphia. He took the image by removing the lens cap and then running into frame where he sat for a minute before covering up the lens again. On the back he wrote “The first light Picture ever taken. 1839.”

Julia Margeret Cameron & Pictorialism

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815 – 79) was an ambitious and devoted pioneer of photography. Best known for her powerful portraits, she also posed her sitters – friends, family and servants – as characters from biblical, historical or allegorical stories.

Pictorialism is an approach to photography that emphasizes beauty of subject matter, tonality, and composition rather than the documentation of reality.

Examples of pictorialism:

 On one occasion Julia printed a negative by the pioneering Swedish art photographer O.G. Rejlander, surrounding the portrait with ferns to create a photo-gram frame – a combination of an image made in a camera and a camera-less technique. It shows Cameron’s experimental nature and provides a glimpse of her photographic practice before she acquired a camera of her own.

Within a month of receiving her camera, she made the photograph that she called her ‘first success’, a portrait of Annie Philpot, the daughter of a family staying in the Isle of Wight where Cameron lived. She later wrote of her excitement:

I was in a transport of delight. I ran all over the house to search for gifts for the child. I felt as if she entirely had made the picture.

-Julia Margaret Cameron

From her ‘first success’ she moved on quickly to photographing family and friends. These early portraits reveal how she experimented with soft focus, dramatic lighting and close-up compositions, features that would become her signature style; pictorialism.

Henry Mullins & Carte-de-Visit

Gustav William Henry Mullins (1854-1921) was a portrait photographer, patronised by Queen Victoria. Gustav Mullins was a partner in the firm Hughes & Mullins, photographers, based at Union Street, Ryde, Isle of Wight.

Cartes De Visite

His specialty was cartes de visite and the photographic archive of La Société contains a massive collection of these. Their on line archive contains 9600 images, but the majority of these are sets of up to 16 photographs taken at a single sitting. In those times even 10s 6d was a substantial sum to pay to have one’s photograph taken, and included among his subjects are many of the island’s affluent and influential people, including Dean Le Breton, the father of Lillie Langtry.

He was also popular with officers of the Royal Militia Island of Jersey, for whom it was very popular to have portraits taken, as well as of their wives and children, for the more senior and more affluent officers. The pictures of these officers show clearly the fashion for long hair, whiskers and beards in the mid-1800s.

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Named after Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, the great Dutch painter, Rembrandt lighting is a common technique for portrait photography. This lighting creates an upside-down triangle on the subjects cheek.

Spotlights were used in Hollywood in the early 20th century to create more realistic effects of light and shadows in the boring typical lighting set up. Rembrant lighting was introduced as an effect and started being used widely in promotional photographs of film stars.

Rembrandt lighting creates dramatic shadows and definition in the models face, enhancing facial feature (like butterfly lighting gut with different shadows). Its effective as it acts as a photographic device to draw the eye.

Rembrandt lighting adds an element of drama and psychological depth to the character of your sitter.

With the eyes being one of the most important and interesting details of a portrait, the triangle of light on the cheek manages to enhance this and intensify the eyes shape and detail, drawing the viewer to the image.

How is Rembrandt lighting created?

Place the main light source 40 to 45-degree angle and higher than the subject. Use cans use both flashlights and continuous lights. (I used flash lighting to create a stronger shadow). Use a 35mm or 50mm if space is at a premium. You can add a reflector to light enhance the light.

My final photos – overall these images turned out alright however I didn’t get many with the triangle of light fully clear so I would like to redo this shoot. My camera was also slightly out of focus so in my next shoot I will fix this.

What is chiaroscuro Lighting?

Chiaroscuro is the use of contrast between light and dark to emphasize and illuminate important figures in a painting or drawing. It was first introduced during the Renaissance. It was originally used while drawing on coloured paper though it is now used in paintings and even cinema.

This is what the lighting set up in the studio would look like.

This type of lighting balances high-contrast light and shade to give the appearance of depth, creating an enhanced or more dramatic effect. It also creates three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional plane, darkening the background and highlighting the subject in the foreground, drawing the viewer’s focus and attention.

Rembrandt Lighting:

I used the Rembrandt Lighting technique to produce some high quality photos with Jude. I made these by having the light pointed at Jude at a certain angle to light up certain parts of his face and I think they turned out very good.

Butterfly Lighting:

Myself and Jude were in these photos, we positioned the light above us to cast the butterfly shadow under our noses and took the photos. These turned out very well detailed and sharp.

Back lighting:

We decided to experiment with the flash light and take photos of us facing in it’s direction to create a silhouette, these turned out pretty good.

Contact Sheet

For these pictures, I focused on the butterfly and Rembrandt lighting techniques. I think I managed to get some successful outcomes, especially for the Rembrandt technique, the photos having deep contrasting tones and the illuminated triangle on the darker side of the face.