Photography originated back in 1822 as an instantaneous form of revealing secrets beyond the world in a nonchalant form, giving nothing away at the same time. Due to the etymology of photography being ‘drawing with light’ this art form is to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary, evoking a variety of emotions and thoughts, creating wonder about what lies beyond the frame of the image.

Camera Obscura

The camera obscura was created along with the pinhole camera in order to ‘fix the shadows,’ in 1010-1021. However, it was said that the camera obscura was a tool used since 400bc. A camera obscura consisted of a large box (eg a blackout room) with a hole in it (small hole at window) which projected an image of its surroundings onto the wall inside. This allowed the outside world to pour in and act as an optical phenomenon. The time taken for the image to be displayed ranged from several minutes to several hours depending on the desired image that was being projected. The environment projected would be presented upside-down and ‘twice as natural’, used for artists to sit inside the box and create paintings or drawings of this area, using darkness to see light. This was called pinhole photography. Now, in more modern times, the camera obscura has been made into an electronic chip.

The camera obscura is a natural optical phenomenon, which has been around long before 1939. This however, is totally natural and not been invented by anyone.

Below is an example of the camera obscura in use more recently. This was done by Abelado Morell of the Santa Maria Della sauté in Venice 2006

Nicephore Niepce

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, was a French inventor who is recognised widely as one of the earliest pioneers of photography through his development of heliography, creating arguably the oldest surviving image made with a camera.

The Niépce Heliograph was made in 1827, during this period of fervent experimentation. It is the earliest photograph produced with the aid of the camera obscura known to survive today.

The photograph was made by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, who was born in 1765 and passed in 1833. He was born to a prominent family at Chalon-sur-Saône in the Burgundy region of France. He was 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. He called them points de vue, 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.’

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. Writing about his process in December 1827, Niépce acknowledged that it required further improvements, but was nevertheless “the first uncertain step in a completely new direction.”

In 1829 Niépce entered into formal partnership with Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (French, 1787–1851), proprietor of the famous Diorama in Paris. Daguerre continued to make vital improvements after Niepce’s death and introduced his “Daguerreotype” process in 1839.

Louis Dageurre

Louis Daguerre was born in 18 November 1787, in Cormeilles-en-Parisis and died 10 July 1851. He was a French artist and photographer. He became one of the fathers of photography, because of his daguerreotype. He is most famous for his contributions to photography, but he was also an accomplished painter, scenic designer, and a developer of the diorama theatre. He was the first panorama painter.

In 1829, Daguerre partnered with Nicéphore Niépce, an inventor who had produced the world’s first heliograph in 1822 and the oldest surviving camera photograph in 1826 or 1827. Niépce died suddenly in 1833, but Daguerre continued experimenting, and evolved the process which would subsequently be known as the daguerreotype. After efforts to interest private investors didn’t work, Daguerre went public with his invention in 1839. At a joint meeting of the French Academy of Sciences and the Académie des Beaux Arts on 7 January of that year, the invention was announced and described in general terms, but all specific details were withheld. He presented the daguerreotype to a few individuals and presented his photographs and news of the daguerreotype quickly spread.

Daguerreotype

The daguerreotype was the first publicly available photographic process, which was widely used in the 1840-1850’s. ‘Daguerreotype’ also refers to an image created through this process.

Invented by Louis Daguerre and introduced worldwide in 1839, the daguerreotype was almost completely superseded by 1856 with new, less expensive processes, such as ambrotype (collodion process), that yield more readily viewable images. There has been a revival of the daguerreotype since the late 20th century by a small number of photographers interested in making artistic use of early photographic processes.

To make the image, a daguerreotypist polished a sheet of silver-plated copper to a mirror finish, then he would use an air gun, so that there was no dust on this plate, that would ruin the photograph. Then it is exposed in a camera for as long as was judged to be necessary, which could be as little as a few seconds for brightly sunlit subjects or much longer with less intense lighting. Next, he torches it, with mercury vapour, so that the image is visible. Then, he removed its sensitivity to light by liquid chemical treatment, which was rinsing it with cool water to cool the hot metal plate down and dried it and then sealed the easily marred result behind glass in a protective enclosure.

The image is on a mirror-like silver surface, as light was reflected back through the image. The image was on the edge of being present, as it was on the surface of the metal mirror, instead of light paper, where the image sinks into it. This meant that the metal one could be wiped away with a finger. These images were described as;

‘A mirror with a memory’

Henry Fox-Talbot

William Henry Fox-Talbot was born on 11th February 1800 and died 17th September 1877. He was an English scientist, inventor, and photography pioneer who invented the salted paper and calotype processes, precursors to photographic processes of the later 19th and 20th centuries. Talbot first began by applying silver salts onto salted paper, creating silver nitrate reactions from the light-sensitivity. This was then exposed to light for many days and then darkened producing negative images. These appeared like shoebox sized cameras and were named mousetraps and were very difficult to use because if it was disturbed it may just get darker and darker so that its only experienced momentarily.

Negative Images- Images are totally inverted. Light areas are dark vice versa and left side is on the right vice versa.

Overall, calotypes were extremely better than Daguerreotypes due to it being easily distributed, reproduced and were much cheaper. Whilst they both used light sensitive silver salts, the Daguerreotypes required a lot more tools and metal plates which had high monetary value.

Richard Maddox

Richard Maddox was born on the 4th August 1816 and died on the 11th May 1902. He was an English photographer and physician who invented lightweight gelatin negative dry plates for photography in 1871.

Long before his discovery of the dry gelatin photographic emulsion, Maddox was prominent in what was called photomicrography. He would photograph minute organisms under the microscope. The eminent photomicrographer of the day, Lionel S. Beale, included as a frontispiece images made by Maddox in his manual ‘How to work with the Microscope.’

In photography, the Collodion process was invented in 1851 by Frederick Scott Archer. This invention required only two to three seconds of light exposure to produce an image, but plates had to be sensitized at the time of exposure, exposed while the emulsion was still wet, and processed immediately after exposure in the camera.

When he noticed that his health was being affected by the ‘wet’ collodion’s ether vapor, Maddox began looking for a substitute. He suggested in the 8 September 1871 British Journal of Photography article An Experiment with Gelatino-Bromide that sensitizing chemicals cadmium bromide and silver nitrate should be coated on a glass plate in gelatin, a transparent substance used for making candies. 

The gelatin or dry plate photographic process involved the coating of glass photographic plates with a light sensitive gelatin emulsion and allowing them to dry prior to use.

The advantages of the dry plate were obvious: photographers could use commercial dry plates off the shelf instead of having to prepare their own emulsions in a mobile darkroom. Negatives did not have to be developed immediately. Also, for the first time, cameras could be made small enough to be hand-held, or even concealed: further research created ‘fast’ exposure times, which led to ‘snapshot’ photography.

George Eastman

George Eastman was born on July 12th 1854 and died March 14th 1942. He was an American entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and helped to bring the photographic use of roll film into the mainstream. After a decade of experiments in photography, he patented and sold a roll film camera, making amateur photography accessible to the general public for the first time.

He provided  quality and affordable film to every camera manufacturer. In 1885, he received a patent for a film roll, and then focused on creating a camera to use the rolls. 1888, he patented and released the Kodak camera.

Kodak- a word Eastman created.

It was sold loaded with enough roll film for 100 exposures. When all the exposures had been made, the photographer mailed the camera back to the Eastman company in Rochester, along with $10. The company would process the film, make a print of each exposure, load another roll of film into the camera, and send the camera and the prints to the photographer. In 1889 he patented the processes for the first nitrocellulose film along with chemist Henry Reichenbach.

Kodak (Brownie)

The brownie is a series of camera models made by Eastman Kodak and first released in 1900. The brownie was a basic cardboard box camera with a simple convex-concave lens that took 2 1/4 inch square pictures on number 117 roll film.  It was conceived and marketed for sales of Kodak roll films, because of its simple controls and initial price of US$1 (equivalent to $37 in 2023) along with the low price of Kodak roll film and processing, the Brownie camera surpassed its marketing goal.

Film/Print Photography

Photographic film is a strip or sheet of transparent film base coated on one side with a gelatin emulsion containing microscopically small light-sensitive silver halide crystals. The sizes and other characteristics of the crystals determine the sensitivity, contrast, and resolution of the film. Film is typically segmented in frames, that give rise to separate photographs.

The emulsion will gradually darken if left exposed to light, but the process is too slow and incomplete to be of any practical use. Instead, a very short exposure to the image formed by a camera lens is used to produce only a very slight chemical change, proportional to the amount of light absorbed by each crystal.

Digital Photography

Digital photography uses cameras containing arrays of electronic photodetectors interfaced to an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) to produce images focused by a lens, as opposed to an exposure on photographic film. The digitized image is stored as a computer file ready for further digital processing, viewing, electronic publishing, or digital printing. It is a form of digital imaging based on gathering visible light.