Camera Obscura
The camera obscura is around 200 years old and its name comes from the Latin words ‘Dark Room’.
What is it and how does it work?
It is a darkened box with a convex lens for projecting the image of an external object on to a screen inside.
A large curtain surrounds the darkened chamber and there is a large lens mounted in a wooden panel. the lens then focuses the light from outside down onto a mirror which is held at a 45 degree angle behind it on the inside. The mirror then reflects the rays of light onto a piece of paper that is laid out flat on the base inside a wooden box. to be able to see the image you would have to cover yourself with a black cloth to stop any light from getting in.
Why does this make it hard to dictate the origins of photography?
The camera Obscura existed before 1839, in 1839 the commercial process came out as Louis Daguerre developed the daguerreotype. This makes it problematic as people will wonder which one came first.
Nicephore Niepce
Niepce was born on March 7th, 1765 and died on July 5th, 1833. He was a french inventor who was the first person to make a permanent photographic image. Niepce began to experiment with the then-novel printing technique. Unskilled in drawing, and unable to obtain proper lithographic stone locally, he sought a way to provide images automatically. He coated pewter with various light-sensitive substances in an effort to copy superimposed engravings in sunlight. From this he progressed in April 1816 to attempts at photography which he called heliography, with a camera.
Henry Fox Talbot
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. Photogenic drawings were basically contact prints on light-sensitive paper, which unfortunately produced dark and spotty images. In 1840 he modified and improved this process and called it the calotype. The mousetraps are sturdy little wooden boxes with a brass tube housing a lens at one end, and a sliding wooden panel at the other. Into the wooden panel at the back Talbot would stick a piece of normal writing paper that he had made chemically sensitive to light.
Daguerreotype
The daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic process (1839-1860) in the history of photography. Named after the inventor, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, each daguerreotype is a unique image on a silvered copper plate. The daguerreotype wasn’t as successful as Talbot’s system because the daguerreotype had serious limitations. The mirror-like surface of the image could only be viewed from a narrow angle. Further, the process produced a one-of-a-kind image that did not permit printing duplicates.
Richard Maddox
Richard Leach Maddox, a British physician and photographer, invented the gelatin silver dry glass plate negative in 1871. The dry plate process quickly replaced the wet plate collodion process that required the mixing of dangerous chemicals and immediate exposure of the wet plate.
Muybridge’s famous Motion Studies
Muybridge worked closely with Senator Leland Stanford on experiments to record horses in motion, trying first to answer the question of whether or not all four feet are off the ground during the trot. In 1873 he successfully captured that event in Sacramento, using Leland Stanford’s horse Occident as his subject. Muybridge is known for his pioneering chronophotography of animal locomotion between 1878 and 1886, which used multiple cameras to capture the different positions in a stride; and for his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting painted motion pictures from glass discs that predated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography. From 1883 to 1886, he entered a very productive period at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, producing over 100,000 images of animals and humans in motion, occasionally capturing what the human eye could not distinguish as separate moments in time.
George Eastman
In the 1880s, Eastman developed a convenient method of preparing ready-to-use plates. Improvements led to flexible, roll film as well as photo processing and printing done by mail order. Millions of people worldwide captured memories using cameras and film, leaving all the chemistry to Kodak. In 1881, with the financial backing of Rochester businessman Henry Strong, Eastman formed the Eastman Dry Plate Company (reincorporated as the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company in 1884 and as Eastman Kodak Company in 1892).
