History of photography
Encyclopedia
The first permanent photograph
was an image produced in 1826 by the French
inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce.
in 1839.
Photography
is the result of combining several different technical discoveries. Long before the first photographs were made, Chinese philosopher Mo Ti and Greek mathematicians Aristotle
and Euclid
described a pinhole camera
in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. In the 6th century CE, Byzantine mathematician Anthemius of Tralles
used a type of camera obscura
in his experiments
Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) (965–1040) studied the camera obscura
and pinhole camera
, Albertus Magnus
(1193/1206–80) discovered silver nitrate
, and Georges Fabricius (1516–71) discovered silver chloride
. Daniel Barbaro described a diaphragm in 1568. Wilhelm Homberg
described how light darkened some chemicals (photochemical effect) in 1694. The novel Giphantie
(by the French Tiphaigne de la Roche
, 1729–74) described what can be interpreted as photography.
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.
In partnership, Niépce (in Chalon-sur-Saône
) and Louis Daguerre
(in Paris
) refined the existing silver process. In 1833 Niépce died of a stroke, leaving his notes to Daguerre. While he had no scientific background, Daguerre made two pivotal contributions to the process. He discovered that exposing the silver first to iodine
vapour before exposure to light, and then to mercury
fumes after the photograph was taken, could form a latent image
. Bathing the plate in a salt bath then fixes
the image. On January 7, 1839 Daguerre announced that he had invented a process using silver on a copper plate called the daguerreotype
, and displayed the first plate. The French government bought the patent and almost immediately (on August 19 of that year) made it public domain.
In 1832, French-Brazil
ian painter and inventor Hercules Florence
had already created a very similar process, naming it Photographie.
After reading about Daguerre's invention, Fox Talbot
worked on perfecting his own process; in 1839 he acquired a key improvement, an effective fixer, from John Herschel
, the astronomer, who had previously showed that hyposulfite of soda (also known as hypo, or now sodium thiosulfate) would dissolve silver salts. Later that year, Herschel made the first glass negative.
By 1840, Talbot had invented the calotype
process. He coated paper sheets with silver chloride
to create an intermediate negative
image. Unlike a daguerreotype, a calotype negative could be used to reproduce positive prints, like most chemical films do today. The calotype had yet another distinction compared to other photographic processes of the day, in that the finished product lacked fine clarity due to its translucent paper negative. This was seen as a positive attribute for portraits because it softened the appearance of the human face. Talbot patented this process, which greatly limited its adoption. He spent the rest of his life in lawsuits defending the patent until he gave up on photography. Later George Eastman
refined Talbot's process, which is the basic technology used by chemical film cameras today. Hippolyte Bayard
had also developed a method of photography but delayed announcing it, and so was not recognized as its inventor.
In 1839, John Herschel
made the first glass negative, but his process was difficult to reproduce. Slovene Janez Puhar
invented a process for making photographs on glass in 1841; it was recognized on June 17, 1852 in Paris by the Académie Nationale Agricole, Manufacturière et Commerciale. In 1847, Nicephore Niépce's cousin, the chemist Niépce St. Victor
published his invention of a process for making glass plates with an albumen emulsion; the Langenheim brothers of Philadelphia and John Whipple of Boston also invented workable negative-on-glass processes in the mid 1840s.
In 1851 Frederick Scott Archer
invented the collodion process
. Photographer and children's author Lewis Carroll
used this process.
Herbert Bowyer Berkeley
experimented with his own version of collodian emulsions after Samman introduced the idea of adding dithionite
to the pyrogallol
developer. Berkeley discovered that with his own addition of sulfite
, to absorb the sulfur dioxide
given off by the chemical dithionite in the developer
, that dithionite was not required in the developing process. In 1881 he published his discovery. Berkeley's formula contained pyrogallol, sulfite and citric acid. Ammonia was added just before use to make the formula alkaline. The new formula was sold by the Platinotype Company in London as Sulpho-Pyrogallol Developer.
Nineteenth-century experimentation with photographic processes frequently became proprietary. The German-born, New Orleans photographer Theodore Lilienthal successfully sought legal redress in an 1881 infringement case involving his "Lambert Process" in the Eastern District of Louisiana.
emerging from the middle classes during the Industrial Revolution
. This demand, that could not be met in volume and in cost by oil painting, added to the push for the development of photography.
In 1847, Count Sergei Lvovich Levitsky
designed a bellows camera which significantly improved the process of focusing. This adaptation influenced the design of cameras for decades and is still found in use today in some professional cameras. While in Paris, Levitsky would become the first to introduce interchangeable decorative backgrounds in his photos, as well as the retouching of negatives to reduce or eliminate technical deficiencies.
Levitsky was also the first photographer to portray a photo of a person in different poses and even in different clothes (for example, the subject plays the piano and listens to himself).
Roger Fenton
and Philip Henry Delamotte
helped popularize the new way of recording events, the first by his Crimean war pictures, the second by his record of the disassembly and reconstruction of The Crystal Palace
in London
. Other mid-nineteenth-century photographers established the medium as a more precise means than engraving or lithography of making a record of landscapes and architecture: for example, Robert Macpherson
's broad range of photographs of Rome, the interior of the Vatican, and the surrounding countryside became a sophisticated tourist's visual record of his own travels.
By 1849, images captured by Levitsky on a mission to the Caucasus, were exhibited by the famous Parisian optician Chevalier at the Paris Exposition of the Second Republic as an advertisement of their lenses. These photos would receive the Exposition's gold medal; the first time a prize of its kind had ever been awarded to a photograph.
That same year in 1849 in his St. Petersburg, Russia studio Levitsky would first propose the idea to artificially light subjects in a studio setting using electric lighting along with daylight. He would say of its use, "as far as I know this application of electric light has never been tried; it is something new, which will be accepted by photographers because of its simplicity and practicality".
In 1851, at an exhibition in Paris, Levitsky would win the first ever gold medal awarded for a portrait photograph.
In America, by 1851 a broadside by daguerreotypist Augustus Washington
were advertising prices ranging from 50 cents to $10. However, daguerreotypes were fragile and difficult to copy. Photographers encouraged chemists to refine the process of making many copies cheaply, which eventually led them back to Talbot's process.
Ultimately, the modern photographic process came about from a series of refinements and improvements in the first 20 years. In 1884 George Eastman
, of Rochester, New York
, developed dry gel on paper, or film
, to replace the photographic plate so that a photographer no longer needed to carry boxes of plates and toxic chemicals around. In July 1888 Eastman's Kodak camera went on the market with the slogan "You press the button, we do the rest". Now anyone could take a photograph and leave the complex parts of the process to others, and photography became available for the mass-market in 1901 with the introduction of the Kodak Brownie
.
In the twentieth century, photography developed rapidly as a commercial service. End-user supplies of photographic equipment accounted for only about 20 percent of industry revenue. For the modern enthusiast photographer processing black and white film, little has changed since the introduction of the 35mm film Leica camera in 1925.
The first digitally scanned photograph was produced in 1957. The digital scanning process was invented by Russell A. Kirsch
, a computer pioneer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He developed the system capable of feeding a camera's images into a computer. His first fed image was that of his son, Walden Kirsch. The photo was set at 176x176 pixels.
Although color photography
was explored throughout the 19th century, initial experiments in color resulted in projected temporary images, rather than permanent color images. Moreover until the 1870s the emulsions available were not sensitive to red or green light.
The first color photo, an additive projected image of a tartan ribbon, was taken in 1861 by the Scottish
physicist James Clerk Maxwell
. Several patentable methods for producing images (by either additive or subtractive methods, see below) were devised from 1862 on by two French inventors (working independently), Louis Ducos du Hauron
and Charles Cros
. Practical methods to sensitize silver halide
film to green and then orange light were discovered in 1873 and 1884 by Hermann W. Vogel
, but full sensitivity to red light was not achieved until the early years of the 20th century.
The first fully practical color plate, Autochrome, did not reach the market until 1907. It was based on a screen-plate method, the screen (of filters) being made using dyed dots of potato starch
. The screen lets filtered red, green or blue light through each grain to a photographic emulsion in contact with it. The plate is then developed to a negative, and reversed to a positive, which when viewed through the screen restores colors approximating the original.
Other systems of color photography included that used by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii
, which involved three separate monochrome exposures ('separation negatives') of a still scene through red, green, and blue filters. These required a special machine to display, but the results are impressive even by modern standards. His collection of glass plates was purchased from his heirs by the Library of Congress
in 1948, and is now available in digital images.
The charge-coupled device
(CCD) is the most important invention for digital photography. It was invented in 1969 by Willard Boyle
and George E. Smith
at AT&T Bell Labs
. The lab was working on the Picturephone and on the development of semiconductor
bubble memory. Merging these two initiatives, Boyle and Smith conceived of the design of what they termed 'Charge "Bubble" Devices'. The essence of the design was the ability to transfer charge along the surface of a semiconductor.
The web
has been a popular medium for storing and sharing photos ever since the first photograph was published on the web by Tim Berners-Lee
in 1992 (an image of the CERN
house band Les Horribles Cernettes
). Today popular sites such as Flickr
, Picasa
and PhotoBucket
are used by millions of people to share their pictures.
Photograph
A photograph is an image created by light falling on a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic imager such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are created using a camera, which uses a lens to focus the scene's visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of...
was an image produced in 1826 by the French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce.
Etymology
The word photography derives from the Greek words phōs (genitive: phōtós) light, and gráphein, to write. The word was coined by Sir John HerschelJohn Herschel
Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Baronet KH, FRS ,was an English mathematician, astronomer, chemist, and experimental photographer/inventor, who in some years also did valuable botanical work...
in 1839.
Technological background
Photography
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...
is the result of combining several different technical discoveries. Long before the first photographs were made, Chinese philosopher Mo Ti and Greek mathematicians Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
and Euclid
Euclid
Euclid , fl. 300 BC, also known as Euclid of Alexandria, was a Greek mathematician, often referred to as the "Father of Geometry". He was active in Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy I...
described a pinhole camera
Pinhole camera
A pinhole camera is a simple camera without a lens and with a single small aperture – effectively a light-proof box with a small hole in one side. Light from a scene passes through this single point and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box...
in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. In the 6th century CE, Byzantine mathematician Anthemius of Tralles
Anthemius of Tralles
Anthemius of Tralles was a Greek professor of Geometry in Constantinople and architect, who collaborated with Isidore of Miletus to build the church of Hagia Sophia by the order of Justinian I. Anthemius came from an educated family, one of five sons of Stephanus of Tralles, a physician...
used a type of camera obscura
Camera obscura
The camera obscura is an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings on a screen. It is used in drawing and for entertainment, and was one of the inventions that led to photography. The device consists of a box or room with a hole in one side...
in his experiments
Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) (965–1040) studied the camera obscura
Camera obscura
The camera obscura is an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings on a screen. It is used in drawing and for entertainment, and was one of the inventions that led to photography. The device consists of a box or room with a hole in one side...
and pinhole camera
Pinhole camera
A pinhole camera is a simple camera without a lens and with a single small aperture – effectively a light-proof box with a small hole in one side. Light from a scene passes through this single point and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box...
, Albertus Magnus
Albertus Magnus
Albertus Magnus, O.P. , also known as Albert the Great and Albert of Cologne, is a Catholic saint. He was a German Dominican friar and a bishop, who achieved fame for his comprehensive knowledge of and advocacy for the peaceful coexistence of science and religion. Those such as James A. Weisheipl...
(1193/1206–80) discovered silver nitrate
Silver nitrate
Silver nitrate is an inorganic compound with chemical formula . This compound is a versatile precursor to many other silver compounds, such as those used in photography. It is far less sensitive to light than the halides...
, and Georges Fabricius (1516–71) discovered silver chloride
Silver chloride
Silver chloride is a chemical compound with the chemical formula AgCl. This white crystalline solid is well known for its low solubility in water . Upon illumination or heating, silver chloride converts to silver , which is signalled by greyish or purplish coloration to some samples...
. Daniel Barbaro described a diaphragm in 1568. Wilhelm Homberg
Wilhelm Homberg
Wilhelm Homberg , also known as Guillaume Homberg in French, was a Dutch natural philosopher.-Life:...
described how light darkened some chemicals (photochemical effect) in 1694. The novel Giphantie
Giphantie
Giphantie is a novel by Tiphaigne de la Roche, Charles-François published in 1760.It is most famous for predicting the modern day process of photography according to M. W...
(by the French Tiphaigne de la Roche
Tiphaigne de la Roche
Charles-François Tiphaigne de la Roche, , was a French author.He was born at Montebourg, Cotentin, studied medicine at the University of Caen and became a physician in 1744....
, 1729–74) described what can be interpreted as photography.
Monochrome process
Photograph
A photograph is an image created by light falling on a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic imager such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are created using a camera, which uses a lens to focus the scene's visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of...
(later accidentally destroyed) was an image produced in 1826 by the French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. His photographs were produced on a polished pewter
Pewter
Pewter is a malleable metal alloy, traditionally 85–99% tin, with the remainder consisting of copper, antimony, bismuth and lead. Copper and antimony act as hardeners while lead is common in the lower grades of pewter, which have a bluish tint. It has a low melting point, around 170–230 °C ,...
plate covered with a petroleum
Petroleum
Petroleum or crude oil is a naturally occurring, flammable liquid consisting of a complex mixture of hydrocarbons of various molecular weights and other liquid organic compounds, that are found in geologic formations beneath the Earth's surface. Petroleum is recovered mostly through oil drilling...
derivative called bitumen of Judea
Bitumen of Judea
The photographic process known as Bitumen of Judea is quite possibly the oldest modern photographic technique. The technique was first used by French lithographer Nicéphore Niépce in the 1820s. In 1826, using a tarlike material that covered a pewter plate, he took a picture of the countryside near...
, 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
Johann Heinrich Schultz
Johann Heinrich Schulze or Schultz was a German professor and polymath from Colbitz in the Duchy of Magdeburg.-History:...
discovery in 1727 that silver nitrate
Silver nitrate
Silver nitrate is an inorganic compound with chemical formula . This compound is a versatile precursor to many other silver compounds, such as those used in photography. It is far less sensitive to light than the halides...
(AgNO3) darkens when exposed to light.
In partnership, Niépce (in Chalon-sur-Saône
Chalon-sur-Saône
Chalon-sur-Saône is a commune in the Saône-et-Loire department in the region of Bourgogne in eastern France.It is a sub-prefecture of the department. It is the largest city in the department; however, the department capital is the smaller city of Mâcon....
) and Louis Daguerre
Louis Daguerre
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was a French artist and physicist, recognized for his invention of the daguerreotype process of photography.- Biography :...
(in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
) refined the existing silver process. In 1833 Niépce died of a stroke, leaving his notes to Daguerre. While he had no scientific background, Daguerre made two pivotal contributions to the process. He discovered that exposing the silver first to iodine
Iodine
Iodine is a chemical element with the symbol I and atomic number 53. The name is pronounced , , or . The name is from the , meaning violet or purple, due to the color of elemental iodine vapor....
vapour before exposure to light, and then to mercury
Mercury (element)
Mercury is a chemical element with the symbol Hg and atomic number 80. It is also known as quicksilver or hydrargyrum...
fumes after the photograph was taken, could form a latent image
Latent image
A latent image on photographic film is an invisible image produced by the exposure of the film to light. When the film is developed, the area that was exposed darkens and forms a visible image...
. Bathing the plate in a salt bath then fixes
Photographic fixer
Photographic fixer is a chemical or a mix of chemicals used in the final step in the photographic processing of film or paper. The fixer stabilises the image, removing the unexposed silver halide remaining on the photographic film or photographic paper, leaving behind the reduced metallic silver...
the image. On January 7, 1839 Daguerre announced that he had invented a process using silver on a copper plate called the daguerreotype
Daguerreotype
The daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic process. The image is a direct positive made in the camera on a silvered copper plate....
, and displayed the first plate. The French government bought the patent and almost immediately (on August 19 of that year) made it public domain.
In 1832, French-Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
ian painter and inventor Hercules Florence
Hércules Florence
Antoine Hercule Romuald Florence was a French-Brazilian painter and inventor, known as the isolate inventor of photography in Brazil, three years before Daguerre , using the matrix negative/positive, still in use...
had already created a very similar process, naming it Photographie.
After reading about Daguerre's invention, Fox Talbot
William Fox Talbot
William Henry Fox Talbot was a British inventor and a pioneer of photography. He was the inventor of calotype process, the precursor to most photographic processes of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was also a noted photographer who made major contributions to the development of photography as an...
worked on perfecting his own process; in 1839 he acquired a key improvement, an effective fixer, from John Herschel
John Herschel
Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Baronet KH, FRS ,was an English mathematician, astronomer, chemist, and experimental photographer/inventor, who in some years also did valuable botanical work...
, the astronomer, who had previously showed that hyposulfite of soda (also known as hypo, or now sodium thiosulfate) would dissolve silver salts. Later that year, Herschel made the first glass negative.
By 1840, Talbot had invented the calotype
Calotype
Calotype or talbotype is an early photographic process introduced in 1841 by William Henry Fox Talbot, using paper coated with silver iodide. The term calotype comes from the Greek for 'beautiful', and for 'impression'....
process. He coated paper sheets with silver chloride
Silver chloride
Silver chloride is a chemical compound with the chemical formula AgCl. This white crystalline solid is well known for its low solubility in water . Upon illumination or heating, silver chloride converts to silver , which is signalled by greyish or purplish coloration to some samples...
to create an intermediate negative
Negative (photography)
In photography, a negative may refer to three different things, although they are all related.-A negative:Film for 35 mm cameras comes in long narrow strips of chemical-coated plastic or cellulose acetate. As each image is captured by the camera onto the film strip, the film strip advances so that...
image. Unlike a daguerreotype, a calotype negative could be used to reproduce positive prints, like most chemical films do today. The calotype had yet another distinction compared to other photographic processes of the day, in that the finished product lacked fine clarity due to its translucent paper negative. This was seen as a positive attribute for portraits because it softened the appearance of the human face. Talbot patented this process, which greatly limited its adoption. He spent the rest of his life in lawsuits defending the patent until he gave up on photography. Later George Eastman
George Eastman
George Eastman was an American innovator and entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and invented roll film, helping to bring photography to the mainstream...
refined Talbot's process, which is the basic technology used by chemical film cameras today. Hippolyte Bayard
Hippolyte Bayard
-Late career:Despite his initial hardships in photography, Bayard continued to be a productive member of the photographic society. He was a founding member of the French Society of Photography...
had also developed a method of photography but delayed announcing it, and so was not recognized as its inventor.
In 1839, John Herschel
John Herschel
Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Baronet KH, FRS ,was an English mathematician, astronomer, chemist, and experimental photographer/inventor, who in some years also did valuable botanical work...
made the first glass negative, but his process was difficult to reproduce. Slovene Janez Puhar
Janez Puhar
Janez Avguštin Puhar was a Slovene priest, photographer, painter, and poet. He invented a process for making photographs on glass in 1841; it was recognized on June 17, 1852 in Paris by the Académie Nationale Agricole, Manufacturière et Commerciale.The "Janez Puhar Photo Society Kranj" is the...
invented a process for making photographs on glass in 1841; it was recognized on June 17, 1852 in Paris by the Académie Nationale Agricole, Manufacturière et Commerciale. In 1847, Nicephore Niépce's cousin, the chemist Niépce St. Victor
Abel Niepce de Saint-Victor
Claude Félix Abel Niépce de Saint-Victor was a French photographic inventor. An army lieutenant and cousin of Nicéphore Niépce, he first experimented in 1847 with negatives made with albumen on glass, a method subsequently used by the Langenheim brothers for their lantern slides...
published his invention of a process for making glass plates with an albumen emulsion; the Langenheim brothers of Philadelphia and John Whipple of Boston also invented workable negative-on-glass processes in the mid 1840s.
In 1851 Frederick Scott Archer
Frederick Scott Archer
Frederick Scott Archer invented the photographic collodion process which preceded the modern gelatin emulsion. He was born in Bishop's Stortford in the UK and is remembered mainly for this single achievement which greatly increased the accessibility of photography for the general public.tyler was...
invented the collodion process
Collodion process
The collodion process is an early photographic process. It was introduced in the 1850s and by the end of that decade it had almost entirely replaced the first practical photographic process, the daguerreotype. During the 1880s the collodion process, in turn, was largely replaced by gelatin dry...
. Photographer and children's author Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll , was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the...
used this process.
Herbert Bowyer Berkeley
Herbert Bowyer Berkeley was an English photographer as well as a chemical engineer. He was the fourth son of The Reverend William Comyns Berkeley and Harriet Elizabeth Bowyer Nichols Berkeley...
experimented with his own version of collodian emulsions after Samman introduced the idea of adding dithionite
Dithionite
The dithionite anion , is an oxoanion of sulfur formally derived from dithionous acid, H2S2O4.-Chemistry:Dithionous acid has not been detected either as a pure compound or in solution....
to the pyrogallol
Pyrogallol
Pyrogallol or benzene-1,2,3-triol is a benzenetriol. It is a white crystalline powder and a powerful reducing agent. It was first prepared by Scheele 1786 by heating gallic acid. An alternate preparation is heating para-chlorophenoldisulphonic acid with potassium hydroxide.When in alkaline...
developer. Berkeley discovered that with his own addition of sulfite
Sulfite
Sulfites are compounds that contain the sulfite ion SO. The sulfite ion is the conjugate base of bisulfite. Although the acid itself is elusive, its salts are widely used.-Structure:...
, to absorb the sulfur dioxide
Sulfur dioxide
Sulfur dioxide is the chemical compound with the formula . It is released by volcanoes and in various industrial processes. Since coal and petroleum often contain sulfur compounds, their combustion generates sulfur dioxide unless the sulfur compounds are removed before burning the fuel...
given off by the chemical dithionite in the developer
Photographic developer
In the processing of photographic films, plates or papers, the photographic developer is a chemical that makes the latent image on the film or print visible. It does this by reducing the silver halides that have been exposed to light to elemental silver in the gelatine matrix...
, that dithionite was not required in the developing process. In 1881 he published his discovery. Berkeley's formula contained pyrogallol, sulfite and citric acid. Ammonia was added just before use to make the formula alkaline. The new formula was sold by the Platinotype Company in London as Sulpho-Pyrogallol Developer.
Nineteenth-century experimentation with photographic processes frequently became proprietary. The German-born, New Orleans photographer Theodore Lilienthal successfully sought legal redress in an 1881 infringement case involving his "Lambert Process" in the Eastern District of Louisiana.
Popularization
The daguerreotype proved popular in responding to the demand for portraiturePortrait photography
Portrait photography or portraiture is the capture by means of photography of the likeness of a person or a small group of people , in which the face and expression is predominant. The objective is to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the subject...
emerging from the middle classes during the Industrial Revolution
Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution was a period from the 18th to the 19th century where major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and technology had a profound effect on the social, economic and cultural conditions of the times...
. This demand, that could not be met in volume and in cost by oil painting, added to the push for the development of photography.
In 1847, Count Sergei Lvovich Levitsky
Sergei Lvovich Levitsky
Count Sergei Lvovich Levitsky , is considered one of the patriarchs of Russian photography and one of Europe's most important early photographic pioneers, inventors and innovators.- Early life :...
designed a bellows camera which significantly improved the process of focusing. This adaptation influenced the design of cameras for decades and is still found in use today in some professional cameras. While in Paris, Levitsky would become the first to introduce interchangeable decorative backgrounds in his photos, as well as the retouching of negatives to reduce or eliminate technical deficiencies.
Levitsky was also the first photographer to portray a photo of a person in different poses and even in different clothes (for example, the subject plays the piano and listens to himself).
Roger Fenton
Roger Fenton
Roger Fenton was a pioneering British photographer, one of the first war photographers.-Early life:Roger Fenton was born in Crimble Hall, Heap, Bury, Lancashire, 28 March 1819. His grandfather was a wealthy cotton manufacturer and banker, his father a banker and Member of Parliament...
and Philip Henry Delamotte
Philip Henry Delamotte
Philip Henry Delamotte was a British photographer and illustrator.Delamotte was born at Sandhurst Military Academy, the son of Mary and William Alfred Delamotte. Philip Delamotte became an artist and was famous for his photographic images of The Crystal Palace of 1851. He eventually became...
helped popularize the new way of recording events, the first by his Crimean war pictures, the second by his record of the disassembly and reconstruction of The Crystal Palace
The Crystal Palace
The Crystal Palace was a cast-iron and glass building originally erected in Hyde Park, London, England, to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. More than 14,000 exhibitors from around the world gathered in the Palace's of exhibition space to display examples of the latest technology developed in...
in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. Other mid-nineteenth-century photographers established the medium as a more precise means than engraving or lithography of making a record of landscapes and architecture: for example, Robert Macpherson
Robert Turnbull Macpherson
Robert Turnbull Macpherson was a Scottish artist and photographer who worked in Rome, Italy, in the 19th century.- Early life :...
's broad range of photographs of Rome, the interior of the Vatican, and the surrounding countryside became a sophisticated tourist's visual record of his own travels.
By 1849, images captured by Levitsky on a mission to the Caucasus, were exhibited by the famous Parisian optician Chevalier at the Paris Exposition of the Second Republic as an advertisement of their lenses. These photos would receive the Exposition's gold medal; the first time a prize of its kind had ever been awarded to a photograph.
That same year in 1849 in his St. Petersburg, Russia studio Levitsky would first propose the idea to artificially light subjects in a studio setting using electric lighting along with daylight. He would say of its use, "as far as I know this application of electric light has never been tried; it is something new, which will be accepted by photographers because of its simplicity and practicality".
In 1851, at an exhibition in Paris, Levitsky would win the first ever gold medal awarded for a portrait photograph.
In America, by 1851 a broadside by daguerreotypist Augustus Washington
Augustus Washington
Augustus Washington was an African American photographer and daguerreotypist, who later in his career emigrated to Liberia. He is one of the few African American daguerreotypists whose career has been documented.-Biography:...
were advertising prices ranging from 50 cents to $10. However, daguerreotypes were fragile and difficult to copy. Photographers encouraged chemists to refine the process of making many copies cheaply, which eventually led them back to Talbot's process.
Ultimately, the modern photographic process came about from a series of refinements and improvements in the first 20 years. In 1884 George Eastman
George Eastman
George Eastman was an American innovator and entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and invented roll film, helping to bring photography to the mainstream...
, of Rochester, New York
Rochester, New York
Rochester is a city in Monroe County, New York, south of Lake Ontario in the United States. Known as The World's Image Centre, it was also once known as The Flour City, and more recently as The Flower City...
, developed dry gel on paper, or film
Photographic film
Photographic film is a sheet of plastic coated with an emulsion containing light-sensitive silver halide salts with variable crystal sizes that determine the sensitivity, contrast and resolution of the film...
, to replace the photographic plate so that a photographer no longer needed to carry boxes of plates and toxic chemicals around. In July 1888 Eastman's Kodak camera went on the market with the slogan "You press the button, we do the rest". Now anyone could take a photograph and leave the complex parts of the process to others, and photography became available for the mass-market in 1901 with the introduction of the Kodak Brownie
Brownie (camera)
Brownie is the name of a long-running and extremely popular series of simple and inexpensive cameras made by Eastman Kodak. The Brownie popularized low-cost photography and introduced the concept of the snapshot. The first Brownie, introduced in February, 1900, was a very basic cardboard box camera...
.
In the twentieth century, photography developed rapidly as a commercial service. End-user supplies of photographic equipment accounted for only about 20 percent of industry revenue. For the modern enthusiast photographer processing black and white film, little has changed since the introduction of the 35mm film Leica camera in 1925.
The first digitally scanned photograph was produced in 1957. The digital scanning process was invented by Russell A. Kirsch
Russell A. Kirsch
Russell A. Kirsch led a team of colleagues in creating America’s first internally programmable computer, the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer , capable of scanning digital images in 1957. SEAC produced a photograph of Kirsch’s three month old son in a mere 176 pixels, measuring 5x5cm...
, a computer pioneer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He developed the system capable of feeding a camera's images into a computer. His first fed image was that of his son, Walden Kirsch. The photo was set at 176x176 pixels.
Color process
Color photography
Color photography is photography that uses media capable of representing colors, which are traditionally produced chemically during the photographic processing phase...
was explored throughout the 19th century, initial experiments in color resulted in projected temporary images, rather than permanent color images. Moreover until the 1870s the emulsions available were not sensitive to red or green light.
The first color photo, an additive projected image of a tartan ribbon, was taken in 1861 by the Scottish
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
physicist James Clerk Maxwell
James Clerk Maxwell
James Clerk Maxwell of Glenlair was a Scottish physicist and mathematician. His most prominent achievement was formulating classical electromagnetic theory. This united all previously unrelated observations, experiments and equations of electricity, magnetism and optics into a consistent theory...
. Several patentable methods for producing images (by either additive or subtractive methods, see below) were devised from 1862 on by two French inventors (working independently), Louis Ducos du Hauron
Louis Ducos du Hauron
Louis Arthur Ducos du Hauron was a French pioneer of color photography. He was born in Langon, Gironde and died in Agen....
and Charles Cros
Charles Cros
Charles Cros was a French poet and inventor. He was born in Fabrezan, Aude, France, 35 km to the East of Carcassonne....
. Practical methods to sensitize silver halide
Halide
A halide is a binary compound, of which one part is a halogen atom and the other part is an element or radical that is less electronegative than the halogen, to make a fluoride, chloride, bromide, iodide, or astatide compound. Many salts are halides...
film to green and then orange light were discovered in 1873 and 1884 by Hermann W. Vogel
Hermann W. Vogel
Hermann Wilhelm Vogel was a German photochemist and photographer who made a key discovery of great importance to photography.-Academic career:...
, but full sensitivity to red light was not achieved until the early years of the 20th century.
The first fully practical color plate, Autochrome, did not reach the market until 1907. It was based on a screen-plate method, the screen (of filters) being made using dyed dots of potato starch
Potato starch
Potato starch is starch extracted from potatoes. The cells of the root tubers of the potato plant contain starch grains . To extract the starch, the potatoes are crushed; the starch grains are released from the destroyed cells...
. The screen lets filtered red, green or blue light through each grain to a photographic emulsion in contact with it. The plate is then developed to a negative, and reversed to a positive, which when viewed through the screen restores colors approximating the original.
Other systems of color photography included that used by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii
Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii
Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky was a Russian chemist and photographer. He is best known for his pioneering work in color photography of early 20th-century Russia.. Library of Congress. Retrieved 13 August 2006.-Early life:...
, which involved three separate monochrome exposures ('separation negatives') of a still scene through red, green, and blue filters. These required a special machine to display, but the results are impressive even by modern standards. His collection of glass plates was purchased from his heirs by the Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
in 1948, and is now available in digital images.
Development of digital photography
Charge-coupled device
A charge-coupled device is a device for the movement of electrical charge, usually from within the device to an area where the charge can be manipulated, for example conversion into a digital value. This is achieved by "shifting" the signals between stages within the device one at a time...
(CCD) is the most important invention for digital photography. It was invented in 1969 by Willard Boyle
Willard Boyle
Willard Sterling Boyle, was a Canadian physicist and co-inventor of the charge-coupled device. On October 6, 2009, it was announced that he would share the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for "the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit—the CCD sensor".-Life:Born in Amherst, Nova Scotia, he...
and George E. Smith
George E. Smith
George Elwood Smith is an American scientist, applied physicist, and co-inventor of the charge-coupled device. He was awarded a one-quarter share in the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for "the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit—the CCD sensor".Smith was born in White Plains, New York...
at AT&T Bell Labs
Bell Labs
Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...
. The lab was working on the Picturephone and on the development of semiconductor
Semiconductor
A semiconductor is a material with electrical conductivity due to electron flow intermediate in magnitude between that of a conductor and an insulator. This means a conductivity roughly in the range of 103 to 10−8 siemens per centimeter...
bubble memory. Merging these two initiatives, Boyle and Smith conceived of the design of what they termed 'Charge "Bubble" Devices'. The essence of the design was the ability to transfer charge along the surface of a semiconductor.
- 1973 - Fairchild SemiconductorFairchild SemiconductorFairchild Semiconductor International, Inc. is an American semiconductor company based in San Jose, California. Founded in 1957, it was a pioneer in transistor and integrated circuit manufacturing...
releases the first large image forming CCD chipMicroprocessorA microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. It is a multipurpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and...
; 100 rows and 100 columns. - 1975 - Bryce Bayer of Kodak develops the Bayer filterBayer filterA Bayer filter mosaic is a color filter array for arranging RGB color filters on a square grid of photosensors. Its particular arrangement of color filters is used in most single-chip digital image sensors used in digital cameras, camcorders, and scanners to create a color image...
mosaic pattern for CCD color image sensors - 1986 - Kodak scientists develop the world's first megapixel sensor.
The web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
has been a popular medium for storing and sharing photos ever since the first photograph was published on the web by Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, , also known as "TimBL", is a British computer scientist, MIT professor and the inventor of the World Wide Web...
in 1992 (an image of the CERN
CERN
The European Organization for Nuclear Research , known as CERN , is an international organization whose purpose is to operate the world's largest particle physics laboratory, which is situated in the northwest suburbs of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border...
house band Les Horribles Cernettes
Les Horribles Cernettes
Les Horribles Cernettes is an all-female parody pop group, self-labelled "the one and only High Energy Rock Band", founded by employees of CERN which performs at CERN and other HEP related events. Their musical style is often described as doo-wop...
). Today popular sites such as Flickr
Flickr
Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to...
, Picasa
Picasa
Picasa is an image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, plus an integrated photo-sharing website, originally created by Idealab in 2002 and owned by Google since 2004. "Picasa" is a blend of the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the phrase mi casa for "my...
and PhotoBucket
Photobucket
Photobucket is an image hosting, video hosting, slideshow creation and photo sharing website. It was founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal and received funding from Trinity Ventures. It was acquired by Fox Interactive Media in 2007....
are used by millions of people to share their pictures.
See also
- History of the cameraHistory of the cameraThe history of the camera can be traced back much further than the introduction of photography. Photographic cameras evolved from the camera obscura, and continued to change through many generations of photographic technology, including Daguerreotypes, calotypes, dry plates, film, and digital...
- Timeline of photography technologyTimeline of photography technologyTimeline of photography technology* 1822 – Nicéphore Niépce takes the first fixed, permanent photograph, of an engraving of Pope Pius VII, using a non-lens contact-printing "heliographic process", but it was destroyed later; the earliest surviving example is from 1825.* 1826 – Nicéphore Niépce...
- List of basic photography topics
Further reading
- Hannavy, John. ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF Nineteenth-Century Photography, 5 volumes http://www.gbhap-us.com/ncphotog/entries.html
- Clerc, L.P. Photography Theory and Practice, being an English edition of "La Technique Photographique" http://www.archive.org/details/PhotographyTheoryAndPractice
External links
- The Photo History Timeline Collection
- A history of photography from its beginnings till the 1920s, by Dr. Robert Leggat
- History of photography, by J. Monge-Najera, University of Costa RicaUniversity of Costa RicaThe University of Costa Rica is a public university in the Republic of Costa Rica, in Central America. Its main campus, Ciudad Universitaria Rodrigo Facio, is located in San Pedro, in the province of San José. It is the oldest, largest, and most prestigious institution of higher learning in...
- The First Photograph at The University of Texas at Austin
- Alhazen, Kepler and the History of Optics
- Camera Obscura, digital library on the history photographic techniques
- http://www.niepce.house.museum
- http://www.niepce-letters-and-documents.com