History of Photography

 

HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Photography is the science, practice, and art of making pictures out of light. This can be done chemically using a substance like photographic film or electronically with an image sensor. It is used in numerous industries, including manufacturing (such as photolithography) and business, in addition to its more obvious applications in the arts, film and video production, leisure activities, hobbies, and mass communication.

In most cases, during a timed exposure, a lens is employed to concentrate light that is reflected or transmitted from objects into a true image on the light-sensitive surface of a camera. At each pixel of an electronic image sensor, an electrical charge is generated. This electrical charge is electronically processed and saved in a digital image file for further display or processing. With photographic emulsion, an unseen latent picture is produced. Depending on the use of the photographic material and the processing technique, this invisible latent image is later chemically "developed" into a visible image, either negative or positive. Traditionally, a print is made from a negative image on film using either contact printing or an enlarger to produce a positive image on a base of paper.

FILM

In 1876, Hurter and Driffield started conducting groundbreaking research on the light sensitivity of photographic emulsions. Their efforts made it possible to create the first quantitative gauge of film speed.

George Eastman, the company's creator, introduced the first flexible photographic roll film in 1885, however this early "film" was actually a coating on a paper basis. The image-bearing layer was removed from the paper as part of the processing and transferred to a gelatin support that had set. In 1889, the first roll of transparent plastic film was produced. It was made of nitrate film, a highly flammable form of nitrocellulose.

Despite being introduced by Kodak in 1908, cellulose acetate, or "safety film," initially found just a few specialized uses as a substitute for the hazardous nitrate film, which had the advantages of being significantly harder, slightly more transparent, and less expensive. While safety film was always used for 16 mm and 8 mm home films, the transition to X-ray film wasn't finished until 1933, and nitrate film remained the norm for 35 mm theatrical motion pictures until it was ultimately phased out in 1951.

Up until the early 21st century, films were the most popular type of photography. However, developments in digital photography pushed customers to digital forms. Even though digital cameras are the most popular in today's photography, both amateur and professional photographers still utilize film. It is likely that a variety of factors, including variations in spectral and tonal sensitivity (S-shaped density-to-exposure (H&D curve) with film vs. linear response curve for digital CCD sensors), resolution, and tone continuity, contribute to the distinct "look" of film-based photographs as opposed to digital images.

BLACK AND WHITE

Black-and-white, or monochrome, photography predominated in the beginning. Black-and-white photography maintained its dominance for decades even after color film became widely accessible because of its lower cost, chemical stability, and "classic" photographic appearance. Black-and-white photography is distinguished by its tones and the contrast between its light and dark sections. Depending on the method, monochromatic images can include shades of a single color rather than just being made up of pure blacks, whites, and intermediate hues of grey. For instance, the cyanotype process results in a blue-toned image. Brownish tones are produced via the albumen print method, which was made public in 1847.

Since well-processed silver-halide-based materials have long been known to have established archival permanence, many photographers still create some monochromatic photos. Some full-color digital photographs are converted to black and white using a variety of processing methods, while some producers of digital cameras have models that only capture monochrome images. Certain color photographs that are undesirable in their original form can be saved by monochrome printing or electronic display; occasionally, they are found to be more successful when shown as black-and-white or single-color-toned images. Despite the long-standing dominance of color photography, monochrome photos are still created, usually for artistic purposes. Almost all digital cameras include a monochrome setting, and almost all image editing programs allow you to combine or exclude specific RGB color channels to create a monochrome image.

COLOR

Beginning in the 1840s, color photography was studied. The color in early color studies had to be exposed for very long times (hours or days for camera photographs), and there was no way to "fix" the photo to stop the color from fading away quickly when exposed to white light.

The three-color-separation theory, which was initially described by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1855, was used to capture the first permanent color photograph in 1861. Maxwell's concept of taking three distinct black-and-white images through red, green, and blue filters is the basis of nearly all practical color processes. The three fundamental channels needed to produce a color image are therefore made available to the photographer. To reproduce colors additively, transparent printouts of the images might be projected through analogous colour filters and layered on the projection screen. In a subtractive technique for color reproduction developed by Louis Ducos du Hauron in the late 1860s, a color print on paper may be created by superimposing carbon copies of the three images made in their complimentary colous.

Positive transparencies from color photography can be utilized in slide projectors, or color negatives can be used to make positive color enlargements on specially coated paper. The development of automated picture printing technology has made the latter the most popular type of film (non-digital) color photography. Color film was reduced to a niche market by low-cost multi-megapixel digital cameras following a transitional period that lasted from 1995 to 2005. Some photographers still favor film due to its particular "look".

DIGITAL

The Sony Mavica was the first consumer camera to use a charge-coupled device for photography in 1981, doing away with the need for film. The Mavica was not a fully digital camera, but it did save pictures to disc and display them on TV.

The Fujix DS-1P, developed by Fujifilm in 1988, was the first digital camera to both record and save images in a digital format.

The first commercially accessible digital single-lens reflex camera, the DCS 100, was launched by Kodak in 1991. Commercial digital photography was created despite the fact that its high cost prevented uses except reportage and professional photography.

Instead of capturing a picture as a series of chemical changes on film, digital imaging uses an electronic image sensor to record the image as a set of electronic data. Chemical photography resists photo manipulation because it uses film and photographic paper, whereas digital imaging is a highly manipulative medium. This is a key distinction between digital and chemical photography. This distinction enables new communicative potentials and applications as well as a level of image post-processing that is somewhat challenging in film-based photography.

The 21st century is dominated by digital photography. Around the world, digital cameras account for more than 99% of all images, with smartphones playing an increasingly large role.