Embedded Files
Now a days, photography is everywhere; from Snap-chat, to Instagram, to selfies, to family portraits. Almost everyone has access to a cameras on their phones, and in our age of media exposure, Its hard to go anywhere without seeing an image of some kind. But it wasn't always like this, especially in the days before photography. Portraits were drawn or painted, and newspapers had artist sketches instead of images taken at the scene. When the ability to capture images without the need of a pencil or a paintbrush became available, it became the first step to one of the biggest cultural impacts in human history.
Around 1000 AD an Arabian scholar named Alhazen invented the very first pinhole camera, called the Camera Obscura, to explain how light travels in straight lines. As time went on, the brightness and clarity of an image produced with a Camera Obscura was discovered to be affected by the size of the aperture.
In 1839, after years of working with Niepce trying to improve Niepce's method of photography, Louis Daguerre invented a more effective method of photography, the daguerreotype. This method fixed the images onto a sheet of silver plated copper. The silver was coated with iodine after being polished and placed in the camera for several minutes. Once the image was done, the sheet was bathed in a solution of silver chloride, and the result was an image that wouldn't be affected by sunlight.
(Photograph by Joseph Nicephore Niepce)
In 1826, the first permanent image was taken by a man name Joseph Nicephore Niepce, who burned the image onto a chemically coated plate. It took eight hours for the countryside image to be burned in by the sun, and Joseph called this method heliography, and his images were also known as sun prints.
The Daguerreotype Era had begun! After Niepce's son, and Louis Daguerre sold the rights of their invention to the French Government and wrote a manual on their process. Daguerreotypes began popping up all over the place, becoming more and more popular. Photographers took images of the sun, of war, and even lightning.
(Photograph taken by Louis Daguerre)
Here is the first image of a person, taken with a daguerreotype. The person can be seen in the bottom left corner.
(Photograph by Roger Fenton)
Though the images taken were sharper than they had ever been before, images were expensive, rare, and a luxury. The exposure time, though no longer eight hours, was still long, and so people searched for a way to shorten both exposure time and sharpen the images. Even so, the road to the creation of modern photography had already been created, and it can be hard to believe that it started over a thousand years ago, in the heat of the sun.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse