THE TIMELINE OF THE CAMERA
written by Suhanee Verma
In today's world, our basic instinct is to take pictures of everything we find worth capturing. We have come to rely upon cameras to store moments that we cannot - Like the time one spent traveling, the first time a child rode a bicycle, or the laughter of a group of friends- without a device to capture and collect these memories, they would be lost and forgotten.
~13th century ~ The era of camera obscura ~
The concept of photography began with " camera obscura" which in Latin translates to a dark box. We may not have heard the name earlier, but this is the same box that most of us have peeped through during school experiments. The device includes a box with four walls and a tiny hole in one of them. It is on the fact that light always travels in a straight path. When these rays pass through the hole, they create an inverted image on the opposite wall. Although the camera obscura couldn't capture images in print, it helped artists draw monuments or people witness a solar eclipse.
~18th century ~ The further development of camera obscura ~
Several experiments concluded that silver salts when exposed to light, darkened. These experiments carved the way for other scientists to use chemistry to obtain temporarily fixed images. Joseph Nicephore Niepce is one such famous scientist that captured the view from his window on paper. He did so by interestingly using an 8-hour exposure on pewter (an alloy) coated with bitumen. He named this process heliography. Inspired by Niepce's work, other scientists worked with different chemicals and used *negative printing to form images on paper. Who would've thought that chemistry forms the basis for modern photography?
First picture taken by Niepce.
~19th century ~ Carte de visite ~
The 19th century involved numerous developments and experiments with cameras, one such is carte de visite. Introduced in 1854, this four-lens camera with a sliding plate holder allowed 8 exposures on a single plate. The images, printed using wet *collodion negatives on albumen paper, made it possible to generate multiple copies. The competition was now against such cheaper, faster, more portable forms of photographs.
--- Collodion was widely used for the advancements of cameras and details of photography. As it is with everything else, the cameras henceforth became better and better.
~20th and 21st century ~ The digital age ~
The late 20th century transitioned into digital cameras and the first version of adobe photoshop. Throughout the century, people relied on both medium and digital forms of photography. However, the transition of the camera from medium-based to technological was inevitable. In comparison to 19th-century images, modern-day images are just a series of numbers. Sounds unbelievable, right? When we click a button to take the picture, an aperture on the lens opens to allow the passage of light. The light is then met with electronic equipment (image sensor chip) that converts light rays into electrical signals. The chip breaks the image into a million pixels( tiny squares or dots) and then assigns a number to the details of each pixel. Therefore, the image is now just a large string of numbers that can be edited,
downloaded, transferred, and so on.
We can easily take thousands of pictures on our phones, cameras. We can share them with friends and family. We can edit, delete, modify them. All because of decades of camera advancements. Not to mention, the thousands of scientists that have revolutionized the very idea of photography.
*negative printing- Negatives are usually formed on a transparent material, such as plastic or glass. Exposure of sensitized paper through the negative, done either by placing the negative in close contact or projecting the negative image onto the paper, reverses these tones and produces a positive photographic print.
*collodion-a yellowish, viscous, highly flammable solution of pyroxylin in ether and alcohol: used in the manufacture of photographic film and medicine chiefly for cementing dressings and sealing wounds.
Comments