Photography has always been an amazing art and its value is immense. It helps people preserve everything from oblivion and it provides human race with the evidence of the things that happened and people who existed. In arts it provides great means for expression of artists.
Basics:
The first permanent photograph was an image produced in 1826 by the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. The word photography derives from the Greek words phōs (genitive: phōtós) light, and gráphein, to write. The word was coined by Sir John Herschel in 1839. The first permanent photograph (later accidentally destroyed) was an image produced in 1826 by the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. His photographs were produced on a polished pewter plate covered with a petroleum derivative called bitumen of Judea, which he then dissolved in white petroleum. Bitumen hardens with exposure to light. The unhardened material may then be washed away and the metal plate polished, rendering a positive image with light regions of hardened bitumen and dark regions of bare pewter. Niépce then began experimenting with silver compounds based on a Johann Heinrich Schultz discovery in 1727 that silver nitrate (AgNO3) darkens when exposed to light. [1]
Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. Typically, a lens is used to focus the light reflected or emitted from objects into a real image on the light-sensitive surface inside a camera during a timed exposure. The result in an electronic image sensor is an electrical charge at each pixel, which is electronically processed and stored in a digital image file for subsequent display or processing. The result in a photographic emulsion is an invisible latent image, which is later chemically developed into a visible image, either negative or positive depending on the purpose of the photographic material and the method of processing. A negative image on film is traditionally used to photographically create a positive image on a paper base, known as a print, either by using an enlarger or by contact printing. [2]
1826: First Permanent Image
French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce uses a camera obscura to burn a permanent image of the countryside at his Le Gras, France, estate onto a chemical-coated pewter plate. He names his technique “heliography,” meaning “sun drawing.” The black-and-white exposure takes eight hours and fades significantly, but an image is still visible on the plate today. [3]
“Photography” is derived from the Greek words photos (“light”) and graphein (“to draw”) The word was first used by the scientist Sir John F.W. Herschel in 1839. It is a method of recording images by the action of light, or related radiation, on a sensitive material.
Pinhole Camera
Alhazen (Ibn Al-Haytham), a great authority on optics in the Middle Ages who lived around 1000AD, invented the first pinhole camera, (also called the Camera Obscura} and was able to explain why the images were upside down. The first casual reference to the optic laws that made pinhole cameras possible, was observed and noted by Aristotle around 330 BC, who questioned why the sun could make a circular image when it shined through a square hole.
The First Photograph
On a summer day in 1827, Joseph Nicephore Niepce made the first photographic image with a camera obscura. Prior to Niepce people just used the camera obscura for viewing or drawing purposes not for making photographs. Joseph Nicephore Niepce’s heliographs or sun prints as they were called were the prototype for the modern photograph, by letting light draw the picture. [4]
African historians’ interest in photographic sources is still rather recent and can be traced back to the mid-1980s. Today, after more than twenty years of research, we know the general outlines of the history of African photography, but have yet to move beyond the larger picture. In having a close look at some centres of the early history of West and Central African photography such as Sierra Leone, Fernando Po and Gabon, as well as at the professional careers of African photographers such as Francis W. Joaque, this paper will contribute to a better and deeper understanding of the early history of West African and Central African photography. Research using and comparing photographs and textual sources from the archive of the Atlantic Visualscape displays a world and a time between 1850 and 1900 when African photographers moved beyond cultural, political and linguistic boundaries to explore potentials in an increasingly competitive market. [5]
Conclusion:
History of photography has been very rich and in a relatively short time has come to a very high level. Nowadays no one can imagine their life without this ”luxury” of being able to capture every important moment in their life and keep it as a memory forever (see http://www.myreflections.com.au/ for photo books options). Photography is developing so fast and all of us is just left to expesct the best which is yet to come.
References:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_photography
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photography
[3] http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photographers/photography-timeline.html
[4] http://inventors.about.com/od/pstartinventions/a/stilphotography.htm
[5] ‘The Topography of the Early History of African Photography’ by Schneider, Jurg
