Photography:

the art or process of producing images by the action of

radiant energy and especially light on a sensitive surface
The word "photography" derives from the
Greek and means, literally, “light writing”
A Brief History of Photography

Camera Obscura Digital Single-Lens Reflex Camera

 Camera Obscura
Latin for “darkroom”
• an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings
• one of the inventions that led to photography
• consists of a box or room with a hole in one side, light from an external
scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside where it is
reproduced, upside-down.
 1826: First Permanent Image

• French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce uses a camera obscura to burn

an image of the French countryside onto a chemical-coated pewter plate
• He names his technique "heliography," meaning "sun drawing"
• The black-and-white exposure takes eight hours and fades significantly,
but an image is still visible on the plate today
 1839: First Photo of a Person

• French painter and chemist Louis Daguerre photographs a Paris street

scene using a camera obscura and his newly invented daguerreotype
process
• The long exposure time (several minutes) means moving objects like
pedestrians and carriages don't appear in the photo, but an unidentified
man who stops for a shoeshine remains still long enough to unwittingly
become the first person ever photographed
 Daguerreotype

• early type of photograph, developed by Louis Daguerre

• image is exposed onto a mirror-polished surface of silver with a coating of
silver halide particles on it
• a negative image, but the mirrored surface of the metal plate reflects the
image and makes it appear positive in the proper light
• daguerreotype is a direct photographic process – can not be duplicated
 Calotype
Greek for “good impression”

• early photographic process introduced

in 1841 by Henry Fox Talbot using paper
coated with silver iodide
• with exposure to light, silver iodide
decomposes to silver leaving iodine as
free element
• excess silver iodide is washed away after
oxidizing the pure silver with a second
application of gallo-nitrate
• as silver oxide is black, the resulting
image is visible
Collodion
• 1851, Englishman Frederick Scott Archer
discovered that collodion could be used
on glass plates, reducing the exposure
time when making the image
• process was very involved and included
the following steps: clean the glass
plate, flow the glass plate with
Collodion, immerse the plate in a silver
nitrate for 3-5 minutes, expose the
plate, develop the plate, and fix the
plate
• all of this was done in a matter of
minutes in a portable darkroom
• after these steps the plate was rinsed in
fresh water, dried and varnished
Gelatin Emulsion
• Richard Leach Maddox, an English
photographer, invented lightweight gelatin
negative plates in 1871
• Collodion images required only 2 - 3 sec of
light, but plates had to be sensitized at the
time of exposure and processed immediately
• Maddox suggested the sensitizing chemicals
cadmium bromide and silver nitrate be coated
on a glass plate in gelatin
• eventually Charles Bennett made the first
gelatin dry plates
• before long the emulsion could be coated on
celluloid roll film
• now photographers could use dry plates off
the shelf instead of having to prepare their
own in a mobile darkroom
• also, for the first time, cameras could be
made small enough to be hand-held
 Kodak’s Brownie
• long-running and extremely popular series
of simple and inexpensive cameras made
by Eastman Kodak
• popularized low-cost photography and
introduced the concept of the snapshot
• first Brownie, introduced in February,
1900, was a very basic cardboard box
camera with a simple lens that took 2¼-
inch square pictures on 117 roll film
• simple controls and initial price of $1, it
was intended to be a camera that anyone
could afford and use, leading to the
popular slogan, "You push the button, we
do the rest."
 Going Digital
• 1969 – Willard Boyle and George Smith at AT&T Bell Labs
invented a charge-coupled device (CCD), the essence of the
design was the ability to transfer charge along the surface of a
semiconductor
• 1975 – Bryce Bayer of Kodak develops the Bayer filter mosaic
pattern for CCD color image sensors
• 1975 – Steven Sasson (engineer at Kodak)
made the first recorded attempt at
building a digital camera. The camera
weighed 8 pounds, recorded B&W images
to a cassette tape, had a resolution of 0.01
megapixels, and took 23 seconds to
capture its first image.
 The First Digital Cameras
• 1988 – first true digital camera that recorded images as a
computerized file was the Fuji DS-1P, which recorded to a 16 MB
internal memory card that used a battery to keep the data in
memory
• 1990 –first commercially available digital camera was the Dycam
Model 1, which used a CCD image sensor, stored pictures digitally,
and connected directly to a computer for download
• 1991 – Kodak brought to market the Kodak DCS-100, the beginning
of a long line of professional digital cameras. It used a 1.3 megapixel
sensor and was priced at $13,000
• 1997 – first megapixel cameras for consumers
• 1999 – introduction of the Nikon D1, a 2.74
megapixel camera at a cost of under $6,000