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The Beginning
The Evolution of Photography – The Beginning
Photography! Who could have thought that we would now be
able to take pictures through a digital camera and transfer
to a computer and change the colors or any of the attributes
of an image or a photograph? Digital cameras are sharper and
provide high quality pictures that can be used over multiple
mediums. Sir John Herschel is a man who invented the term
‘Photography’ in 1839. This was also the year when the
process of Photography was unveiled to the public.
How did
photography really evolve? Well! It is the bi-product of
laws of physics and compounds of chemistry. The evolution of
photography is a completely scientific process starting with
the use of optics in the 1830’s. The dark room or Camera
Obscura existed some four hundred years back, while cameras
were being used since the 11th century and yet
photography did not come into public use before the 1830’s.
There
were different observations made by several people that
finally led to putting together of all the missing pieces
and this also announced the advent of photography. Some of
those important observations are:
-
In the 15th century, Robert Boyle found out
that silver chloride turned dark when exposed to air and
not light.
-
In the early 1800’s Angelo Sala observed that when
silver nitrate powder is kept in the sun for long, it
turns black.
-
Around 1727, Johann Heinrich Schulze made a discovery
regarding colors. There were some liquids that changed
their colors when they were exposed to light
-
Thomas Wedgwood conducted some experiments in the early
19th century. He had captured images but
could make the images permanent.
-
The first ever successful production of a photograph
emerged in the June-July of 1827 by Joseph Nicéphore
Niépce. The material used for this became hard when
exposed to light for almost 8 hrs. Niépce went into a
partnership with Louis Daguerre on 4th Jan,
1829 to work further on this.
Four
years later in 1833, Niépce died and Daguerre continued
alone to discover how to develop photographic plates.
Invention of the photographic plates meant that the exposure
time was reduced considerably, from 8 hrs to 30 minutes. He
also made another important observation and the conclusion
drawn was that immersing an image in salt would make it
permanent. Paul Delaroche, a leading French scholar made a
report on this and the French government bought the rights
in July 1839, and made it public on 19th Aug,
1839. This process was named Daguerreotype after Louis
Daguerre.
The
Daguerreotype process was expensive and one time affair. At
that time there were no negatives available and hence the
original photograph could not be reproduced. The only way of
getting two copies was by using two cameras side by side.
This led to the growing need of finding a way to copy
pictures and finally led to the invention of the Calotype
process by William Henry Fox Talbot. Although the
Daguerreotype was superior to the Calotype, the latter was
able to provide multiple positive prints of a single picture
in 1840.
This was
the calling of a new dawn!
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