While researching Photographers in San Pedro de Alcantara last week for a client’s photo shoot I came across some interesting and unusual facts surrounding photography and the science behind photography. For example in an imaginary work called Giphantie by de la Roche (1729- 1774) there is a description of a canvas coated with a sticky substance which can capture a mirror image from nature. If the canvas was allowed to dry in the dark the image would become permanent. The author would have no idea how prophetic his vision of a magic canvas would become just a few decades after his death.
Sir John Herschel and Joseph Nicéphore Niépce
Sir John Herschel is credited with coining the word “Photography” in 1839 when the photographic process became public. The word is derived from the Greek words for light and writing. The first successful picture was produced a few years earlier in 1826 by French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. The process required an exposure time of eight hours and used chemicals that hardened on exposure to light.
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre
In 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, a French painter and chemist photographed a Paris street scene from his apartment using a camera obscura and his newly invented daguerreotype process. The exposure time of this process was several minutes which meant moving objects like carriages and pedestrians don’t appear in the photo. However, one anonymous gent remained still long enough to unknowingly become the first person ever photographed. (He was having a shoeshine at the time.)
Henry Fox Talbot
In 1841, Henry Fox Talbot invented the negative from which multiple positive prints could be made. Talbot, an English botanist and mathematician, perfected a process that employed a silver salt solution which made paper sensitive to light. When the paper was exposed to light a negative image of the subject was rendered in gradations of grey. Contact prints were made from the negative image which reversed the light and shadows to create a detailed picture. Talbot named this process calotype which is Greek for beautiful picture.
James Clerk Maxwell
James Clerk Maxwell was an Edinburgh born physicist who made some far-reaching advances in electromagnetism and is said to be one of the greatest scientists who has ever lived. Maxwell enjoyed many achievements in his lifetime and amongst those was the first demonstration of colour photography. For his demonstration, he arranged for three photographic slides of a tartan ribbon taken by the professional photographer, Thomas Sutton. Individual slides were exposed respectively through red, green and blue filters. When the red green and blue images were projected onto a screen the tartan ribbon could be seen in its original colour.
The demonstration took place in London in 1861, the same year that Edinburgh Photographic Society was founded.
The Reverend Hannibal Goodwin
The Reverend Hannibal Goodwin (1822-1900), an Episcopal priest at the House of Prayer in Newark, New Jersey took up photography so that he could produce his own illustrations for his talks to children in his Sunday school. On 2nd May 1887 the Reverend lodged a patent application for light-sensitive celluloid strips, essentially film roll. The patent was not granted until 13 September 1898 (Patent number: 610861) due to some underhand interference from The Eastman Kodak Company who were successfully sued some years for the sum of 5,000,000 US Dollars.
George Eastman
George Eastman, an avid photographer, launched the Kodak Company in 1888 and the first Kodak camera entered the market. Eastman wanted to simplify photography and make it accessible to the masses, not just trained professional photographers.
The first Kodak camera was handheld and came pre-loaded with 100 exposures. After all the shots taken, the whole camera was returned to the Kodak so that the film could be developed and prints be made. A new roll of photographic film was inserted and the camera, along with the prints, was returned to the owner.
Edwin Land
American scientist Edwin Land invented and produced the first instant camera in 1947. Marketed for commercial use through Land’s own company, Polaroid, consumers were attracted by the convenience and simplicity of using Polaroid instant cameras. What was remarkable about this camera was that it produced instant photographs without any requirement for development time or a darkroom.
The Digital Era
In the late 1980s, digital photography entered the world of newspaper publishing. Kodak’s, Professional Digital Camera System (DCS) allowed photojournalists to take electronic pictures using a Nikon F-3 camera, with a 1.3 megapixel sensor.
the Dycam Model 1, introduced to the world in 1990,was the first real digital camera aimed at the consumer was. It produced 320 x 240 pixel black and white photos and was capable of storing 32 compressed images on 1MB of on-board memory. The images could be downloaded, using a cable, to a PC or a Mac.
Convergence
Nowadays, literally everyone with a mobile phone has access to a ‘built in’ camera. Photographs can be exchanged between phone users, sent over the internet or Bluetooth, in an instant a photograph can be snapped and viewed by someone else on the other side of the world. One of the paradigms to come out of this is Citizen Journalism, where images taken on these devices make regular appearances on live news broadcasts.
Photography and the camera have come a long way; in fact you could say that photography has been completely democratized. Almost anyone has access to a camera and today’s point and click technology requires little knowledge of technique. However, although photography has been somewhat democratised the skills of the professional photographer most definitely have not!
Books By James Allen