History of Photography
Introduction
Photography has had its lifetime of changes, and we have not seen the end it. The early cameras are what we now know today as the pinhole camera, a darkened box with a pinhole that lets light in, making an inverted image of the object it is taking a picture. As time passed, the camera changed and evolved to be the camera we see in our smartphones today.
The evolution of Photography
Joseph Niepce gave birth to the principles of photography with his development of light surface for use in the camera. However, the Niepce camera took eight hours of exposure time to produce a picture. This made it impossible to take images of most objects, especially moving ones. The famous picture View from the Window at Gras was blurry due to the long exposure period that compromised the picture clarity.
A solution to the problem was solved by Louis Daguerre, who invented the daguerreotype in 1839. This technique reduced the exposure time, resulting in better clarity. The 1837 picture The Artist’s studio was shot using daguerreotype, showing better picture quality as compared to photo taken by Niepce. The problem with this method was that it took only one photo image.
As Daguerre was solving one problem, further away was another invention called Talbot’s method by Henry Fox Talbot. One trait of Talbot’s approach is that it involved taking the image of an object in a negative, which would then be converted to a positive, which is the final picture. Such storage of the image allowed more than one picture to be made out of a single negative image. The picture The Open Door of 1844 was taken with Talbot’s camera, and the minute details in that picture show a lot of improvements from previous cameras.
To reduce the exposure time further, the collodion was invented in 1851, which allowed exposure time to be less than five minutes. The downside of such a method was the gun cotton used in the glass plate needed to be we when taking photos, requiring the photographers to carry large dark rooms to develop the images. This was by a dry glass plate designed in 1867. The photo Galloping Horse was taken in 1878 using dry plates.
In 1888, George Eastman invented a dry roll film that could be carried around. He also the small camera’s that were inexpensive, allowing the ordinary people to own cameras and take photographs at their will.