The word ‘photography’ comes from the Greek words ‘phos’ and ‘graphein’ – light, and to write respectively. Sir John Herschel first used the word in 1839.
Photography came about by combining different technical discoveries. Before the first photographs, Chinese philosopher Mo Ti and Greek mathematicians Aristotle and Euclid talked about a pinhole camera in the 4th and 5th centuries BC. In the 6th century CE, Byzantine mathematician Anthemius of Tralles used a kind of ‘camera obscura’ for his experiments. Ibn al-Haytham studied this also, along with the pinhole camera. Albertus Magnus discovered silver nitrate and Georges Fabricius discovered silver chloride. Daniel Barbaro talked about a diaphragm in 1568. Wilhelm Homberg talked about light darkening some chemicals ie. the photochemical effect in 1694. Tiphaigne de la Roche wrote a novel named Giphantie describing what could be thought of today as photography.
Joseph Nicephore Niepce created the first permanent photograph in 1826. These were produced on a pewter plate covered in a petroleum-like substance called bitumen of Judea, which hardens with exposure to light. The unhardened part can then be washed away and the metal plate polished, leaving a negative image. This is then coated in ink and impressed on paper, making a print. Niepce also experimented with iron compounds based on a Johann Heinrich Schultz discovery in 1724 – that an iron and chalk mixture darkens when exposed to light. Together, Niepce and Louis Daguerre refined the existing silver process. When Niepce died, this was left to Daguerre, who had no scientific background. However, he made two crucial contributions to the process. He discovered that by exposing silver to iodine vapour before light, and then to mercury fumes afterwards, he could form a latent image. He also discovered that bathing the plate in a salt bath would fix the image. In January 1839, Daguerre announced that he had invented a process using silver on a copper plate called the daguerreotype – a patent which was bought by the French government before being made public domain. However, in 1832, French-Brazilian painter and inventor Hercules Florence had already created a very similar process, naming it ‘Photographie’.
After reading about Daguerre’s invention, Fox Talbot worked on his own process; in 1839 he made a key improvement – from John Herschel, the astronomer, who had already showed that hyposulfite of soda would dissolve silver salts, creating an effective fixer. This was the year that Herschel created the first glass negative.
By 1940, Talbot had created the calotype process. He coated paper sheets with silver chloride, creating an immediate negative image. This differed from a daguerreotype because a calotype negative could be used to reproduce positive prints, as most chemicals films do today. Talbot patented this process, limiting its adaption. He spent the rest of his life in lawsuits defending this process, until he later gave up on photography. Later, George Eastman improved Talbot’s process, creating the basic technology used by chemical film cameras today.
Hippolyte Bayard had also developed a similar method, but delayed announcing it, and was not recognized as its inventor.
After John Herschel made the first glass negative in 1839, he found his process difficult to reproduce. Slovene Janez Puhar invented a process for making photographs on glass in 1841; however it was not recognized until June 1852 in Paris by the Academie Nationale Agricole, Manufacturiere et Commerciale. In 1847, Niepce St. Victor published his invention of a process for making glass plates with an albumen emulsion; the Langenheim brothers of Philadelphia and John Whipple of Boston also invented workable negative-on-glass processes in the mid 1840s.
In 1851, Frederick Scott Archer invented a process called collodion. Photographer and children’s author Lewis Carroll used this process. Herbert Bowyer Berkeley experiment with his own version of this after Samman introduced the idea of adding dithionite to the pyrogallol developer. Berkeley discovered that with his own addition of sulfite, which he used to absorb the sulfur dioxide given off by the dithionite in the developer, dithionite was not required to develop. In 1881 he published this discovery. His formula contained pyrogallol, sulfite and citric acid. Ammonia was added just before used to make the formula alkaline. The new formula was sold by the Platinotype Company in London as Sulpho-Pyrogallol Developer.
19th century experiments with photography happened more and more often. The German-born, New Orleans photographer Theodore Lilienthal got legal redress in an 1881 infringement case involving his ‘Lambert Process’ in the Eastern District of Louisiana.
The daugerreotype was popular for portraiture amongst the middle classes during the Industrial Revolution. As this demand could not be met by oil painting portraiture, the push for the development of photography grew.
In 1847, Count Sergei Lvovich Levitsky designed a bellows camera. This significantly improved the process of focusing. This adaptation influenced the design of cameras for decades and is still found in professional cameras today. Whilst in Paris, Levitsky would be the first to introduce interchangeable backgrounds in his images, as well as the retouching/manipulation of images to reduce or get rid of technical deficiencies. Levitsky was also the first photographer to show a photograph of a person in different poses and even in different clothes. Roger Fenton and Philip Henry Delamotte helped popularize this new way of recording events. The first was his Crimean War pictures, the second, his record of the disassembly and reconstruction of The Crystal Palace in London.
By 1849, Levitsky’s images from a mission to the Caucasus were exhibited by a famous French optician as an advertisement of their lenses. These images received the Exposition’s gold medal. This was the first time a prize of its kind had been awarded to a photograph. The same year, Levitsky first proposed the idea to artificially light subjects in a studio setting using electric lights in conjunction with daylight. He later said “as far as I know, this application of electric lighting has never been tried; it is something new, which will be accepted by photographers because of its simplicity and practicality”.
In 1851, Levitsky would win the first ever gold medal awarded for a portrait photograph. This was at a Parisian exhibition. By this time in America, a broadside by daguerreotypist Augustus Washington were advertising prices ranging from 50 cents to $10. However, daguerreotypes were fragile and difficult to reproduce, meaning many photographers encouraged chemists to refine the process of cheap mass production, eventually leading them back to Talbot’s process.
Most of the modern photographic processes come from improving and refining the techniques in the first 20 years. In 1884, George Eastman from New York, developed dry gel on paper, or film, to replace the photographic plate that had been earlier used. This was so a photographer no longer had to carry boxes of plates and toxic chemicals around. In July 1888 Eastman’s Kodak camera went on the market with the slogan “you press the button, we do the rest”. This meant that anybody could take a photograph, leaving the complex parts of the process to others. Photography then became available for the mass-market in 1901 with the introduction of the Kodak Brownie.
In the 20th century, photography developed quickly as a commercial service. For the modern enthusiast photographer processing black and white film, not a lot has changed since the introduction of the 35mm film Leica camera in 1925. The first digitally scanned image was produced in 1957. The digital scanning process was invented by Russell A. Kirsch, a computer pioneer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He developed the system capable of feeding a cameras images into a computer. His first fed image was one of his son, Walden Kirsch. The photo was set at 176x176 pixels.
Although colour photography had been explored throughout the 19th century, initial experiments in colour resulted in projected temporary images, rather than permanent images. Moreover, until the 1870s the emulsions available were not sensitive to red or green light. The first colour photo, an additive projected image of a tartan ribbon, was taken in 1861 by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Several patentable methods for producing images were created from 1862 onwards by two French inventors, both working independently. These were Louis Ducos du Hauron and Charles Cros. Practical methods to sensitize silver halide film to green and then orange light were discovered in 1873 and 1884 by Hermann W. Vogel, but full sensitivity to red light was only achieved until the early 20th century.
The first fully practical colour plate, named Autochrome, only reached the marked in 1907. It was based on a screen-plate method, the screen of filters being made using dyed dots of potato starch. The screen lets filtered red, green or blue light though each grain to a photographic emulsion in contact with it. The plate is then developed to a negative, and reversed to a positive, which when looked at through the screen restores colours approximating the original.
Other systems of colour photography include the system used by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, which involved three separate monochrome exposures of a still scene through red, green and blue filters. These required a special machine to display, but the results are impressive even by modern standards. His collection of glass plates was purchased from his heirs by the Library of Congress in 1948, and is now available in digital images.
The charge-coupled device (CCD) is the most important invention for digital photography. Willard Boyle and George E. Smith developed it in 1969 at AT&T Bell Labs. The lab was working on the Picturephone and on the development of semiconductor bubble memory. Merging these two initiatives, Boyle and Smith conceived of the design of what they termed ‘Charged “Bubble” Devices’. The essence of the design was the ability to transfer charge along the surface of a semiconductor.
In 1973 Fairchild Semiconductor releases first large image forming CCD chip; 100 rows and 100 columns. In 1975 Bryce Bayer of Kodak develops the Bayer filter mosaic pattern for CCD colour image sensors, and in 1986 Kodak scientists develop the words first megapixel sensor.
The web has been a popular medium for storing and sharing photos ever since the first photograph was published on the web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1992. This was in image of the CERN house band Les Horribles Cernettes. Today, popular sites such as Flickr, Picasa and PhotoBucket are used by millions of people to share their pictures.
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