A Brief
Introduction to
Photo History
Although photography as we know it
is among the youngest of the major art
forms, its history can be traced back to
ancient times. Chinese philosopher MoZi discussed the principles of a camera
obscura in the 4th or 5th century BCE.
For two thousand years it was known
as a small dark room (or box) with a tiny
hole in one wall, through which light
shone and projected an inverted image.
During the late 1500s, Giambattista
della Portia perfected its design by
adding a convex lens to the hole,
making a sharper, more detailed image.
Camera obscuras allowed artists to
trace a scene in ink for a more faithful
reproduction.
The Early Days of Image
Processing
The 18th and 19th centuries saw
a multitude of methods for image
processing and creation. In 1727,
Johann Schulze mixed chalk, silver, and
nitric acid - a very early photosensitive
compound - noting that one side of
the flask darkened when exposed to
sunlight. In 1816, Joseph Nicéphore
Niépce created the world's first
photograph by coating a metal plate in a
silver chloride solution and exposing it
to light for 8 hours. However, he did not
discover a way of permanently fixing
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the image for another decade.
William Henry Fox Talbot applied
Niépce's recipe to paper in 1834, fixing
the images with a salt solution and
eventually patenting the first paper
negative as the “Calotype” in 1841.
Meanwhile, Louis Daguerre was
creating the Daguerrotype by coating
copper sheets in silver iodide, creating
a metal negative which he developed
in a solution of mercury. These two
inventions lead to the creation of
photography. To that end, on August
19, 1839 the French government
publicly acknowledged the invention of
photography.
The first glass negative was made by
Frederick Scott Archer in 1851 using
a wet plate collodion process. During
the 1850s, the tintype photograph
emerged; this made the negative image
appear positive by exposing it onto a
dark-coloured metal sheet coated with
collodion, which made the shadows
appear light and the highlights dark.
In 1861, James Clerk-Maxwell realized
that he could photograph a scene three
times, through a red, blue, and green
filter, and project the images on top of
each other to create a full-colour image.
Finally, in 1871, Richard Leach Maddox
suspended the silver solution in gelatin,
creating the dry emulsion which sent
photography skyrocketing. It was
applied first to glass negatives, but
would later find its way onto the thin
plastic film that made photography
possible for the public at large.