11/12/2024
The history of
began with the finding of two fundamental principles: The first is the projecting of images by camera obscura, the second that some matters are changed by light, in visible manners[2]. No traces of images captured by exposing light-sensitive materials can be found from before the 18th century.
View from the Window at Le Gras 1826 or 1827, believed to be the earliest surviving camera photograph.[1] Original (left) and colorized reoriented enhancement (right).
Around 1717 Johann Heinrich Schulze managed to take a photograph of the silhouette of cut-out letters using a light-sensitive paste but he didn't carry this any further to turn into a permanent image. In around 1800, Thomas Wedgwood carried out the first adequately documented though unsuccessful attempt to produce permanent camera images. Though his experiments did provide fairly detailed photograms, he and his collaborator, Humphry Davy could find no method for fixing the images.
In 1826, Nicéphore Niépce was able to capture the first fixed image with a camera, but at least eight hours or even several days of exposure in the camera were needed and the earliest results were very crude. Louis Daguerre, who worked with Niépce, developed the daguerreotype process, the first publicly announced and commercially viable photographic process. The daguerreotype needed only minutes in the camera to expose it, and the results that came out were clear with fine details. On August 2, 1839 Daguerre exposed the details of the process to the Chamber of Peers in Paris. The technical details were made public on August 19 during a meeting of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Fine Arts in the Palace of Institute. (To reward the rights of the inventions to the public, Daguerre and Niépce were given large life annuities).[3][4][5] Upon the public presentation of the metal-based daguerreotype process, the alternative paper-based calotype negative and salt print processes discovered by William Henry Fox Talbot were already demonstrated in London-but not with the same level of publicity.[5] Following improvements made photography much more accessible and versatile. New materials decreased the camera exposure time from minutes to seconds, and then down to a fraction of a second; new photographic media were either cheaper, more sensitive, or more convenient. The collodion process using glass-based photographic plates offered since the 1850s the combination of quality known from the Daguerreotype and the possibilities of multiple prints known from the calotype and dominated for decades. Roll films promoted casual use by amateurs. By the middle of the 20th century, developments permitted amateurs to take pictures both in natural color and black-and-white.
The introduction of computer-based electronic digital cameras in the 1990s soon revolutionized photography. During the first decade of the 21st century, traditional film-based photochemical methods were increasingly marginalized as the practical advantages of the new technology became widely appreciated and the image quality of moderately priced digital cameras was continually improved. Especially since cameras became a standard feature on smartphones, taking pictures.