Photography – meaning ‘drawing or writing in light’ A brief history of ‘writing in light’

The Camera (Qamara)EPISODE ONE

It only took....2500 years or 130,250 weeks

to arrive

Early History...A Surprise!• Photography is the result of combining several discoveries. • 5th & 4th Century BC - Chinese philosopher Mo Ti & Greek

mathematicians Aristotle and Euclid described a pinhole camera • In the 6th century AD - Byzantine mathematician Anthemus of Tralles used a

type of camera obscura in his experiments.

• 965 in Basra – c. 1040 in Cairo - Ibn al-Haytham(Alhazen) studied the camera obscura and pinhole camera.

• 1206-80 Saint Alburtus Magnus discovered silver nitrate.• 1516-71 Georges Fabricius discovered silver chloride. • 1568 - Daniel Barbaro described a diaphragm ( Aperture ) • 1694 - Wilhelm Homberg described how light darkened some chemicals

(photochemical effect).• 1729–74 - The novel Giphantie by Tiphaigne de la Roche, described what

could be interpreted as photography.• 1955 – Tone was born...So you can have this presentation, bless him!

The camera obscuraEarly photo folk ( homo nikonicus blanko pict-erectus ) had no way to preserve images produced by camera obscuras apart from manually tracing the images.

Some early obscuras - were room sized & known to exist in the Arab world.Hence the word Camera coming from the Arab .... Qamara

Camera Obscura means......The Darkened Chamber

Late Iberian- Homo nikonicus erectus... pretends he has a qamara

...examples of camera obscura

Why is the image projected upside down camera obscura or pin hole?

Light travels in a straight line, which means rays from above the pinhole will pass through it

and hit the bottom of the wall opposite. Rays from below the pinhole will hit the top of the

back wall; hence, forming the upside down image.

Now you get to make your ownCamera Obscura

• Get a Pringles tube & remove opened end.• Insert a rolled piece of black paper inside the

tube, to make the inside dark.• Poke a pinhole in one end about 1.5mm diameter

& leave in place.• Remove other end & place a piece of tracing or

greaseproof paper neatly on the open end – secure with cellotape.

• There you have it – go point it at something bright

And now for some really old photos...

Daguerreotype camera 1839 – Lens by Charles Chevalier

1826-First permanent photograph

By French inventor Joseph Nicephore Niepce – On bitumen/pewter plate

9,700 Weeks ago!

Daguerre copper plate with silver then iodine vapour treated to make light sensitive

1835 Louis Daguerre - First ever photograph of people

1861 First Colour Photograph

Tartan ribbon by Thomas Sutton & James Clerk Maxwell.

Thomas Sutton & James Clerk Maxwell. – father of electromagnetism

• The image of a tartan ribbon is the first-ever permanent colour photograph, and it was taken 150 years ago with the legendary scientist James Clerk Maxwell.

• In order to illustrate a lecture on colour vision on May 17, 1861, Clerk Maxwell asked Thomas Sutton, a photography innovator in his own right who had invented the first camera with a wide-angle lens, to take three separate photographs of a tartan ribbon, each time using a different filter. The result was the first colour photograph, and so the three-color process was born.

1849 Calotype print

American photographer Frederick Langenheim. Caption says Talbotype process

1839 - One of the oldest portraits known by Joseph Draper New York

Portrait is of Anna Katherine Draper the photographers sister.

1855 – Punch cartoon satirizing

problems with posing for

Daguerrotypes slight movement during exposure,

resulting in blurred pics

19th Century studio set up- note the head clamp

1855 – Fenton’s photographic van

Roger Fenton & Philip Delamotte helped popularise photography & recorded the construction & de-construction of the Crystal Palace

150 years later

1854 - The Crystal Palace, Sydenham

By Philip Henry Delamotte

Bit about photographic plates• Plates preceded photographic film as a

target medium in photography. • A light-sensitive emulsion of silver salts

was applied to a glass plate. • This form of photographic material

largely faded from the consumer market in the early years of the 20th century, as more convenient and less fragile films were introduced.

• Photographic plates were still in use by some photography businesses until the 1970s and were in wide use by the professional astronomical community as late as the 1990s.

Negative Plate

Agfa Plates c1880

1885-1889...Along comes film

• 1885 George Eastman manufactured paper film

• 1889 Switched to celluloid• 1888/89 First camera called the

Kodak• By end of 19th century produced

several inexpensive camera models resulting in the snapshot concept

• 1960 The Brownie was so popular various models remained on sale until the 1960s

So now we have the beginnings of fixed images.

The birth of modern photography in 1885-1889

In 1900 George Eastman took to the mass market

with the Brownie box (snapshot) camera.Pre loaded with 100

exposuresKodak No 2 Brownie box camerac.1910 by George EastmanUse it and send it back to the factory for developing and re reloading

5,835 Weeks ago!

Next episode – from film to digital & spy satellites....

1981 Sony Mavica 1st digital camera ever!

1651 weeks ago!

‘Cheers Tone..great presentation..hic!