The history of Photography!
Let’s talk about camera’s and how Arab’s have a major role in modern photography.
We all love to take pictures. In fact photography is kinda magical when you think about it. You see something and you can capture that moment in time and look at it forever. Imagine the startup potential of that idea! If I’m correct, the history of Photography dates back to China. That was when Camera Obscura was first used.
It is the natural optical phenomenon that occurs when an image of a scene at the other side of a screen (or, for instance, a wall) is projected through a small hole in that screen as a reversed and inverted image (left to right and upside down) on a surface opposite to the opening. This was idea that sparked a revolution.
You would think this was an accidental discovery but nope. They were mathematicians. Greek mathematicians Aristotle and Euclid independently described a camera obscura in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. It was an Arab physicist who later developed the first Pinhole Camera.
Things started kicking off in the beginning of the 19th century. Photography meant to capture and keep the image produced by the camera obscura. In the same time Albertus Magnus discovered silver nitrate, and Georg Fabricius discovered silver chloride which was a breakthrough then. The technique was described in the bn al-Haytham’s Book of Optics
In the Book of Optics, al-Haytham claimed the existence of primary and secondary light, with primary light being the stronger or more intense of the two. The book describes how the essential form of light comes from self-luminous bodies and that accidental light comes from objects that obtain and emit light from those self-luminous bodies. The development of the Diaphragm was also a critical part in this. The role of the diaphragm is to stop the passage of light, except for the light passing through the aperture.
Enough of history?
Remember the discovery of silver nitrate? British inventor Thomas Wedgwood made the first known attempt to capture the image in a camera obscura by means of a light-sensitive substance. He used paper or white leather treated with silver nitrate. Although he succeeded in capturing the shadows of objects placed on the surface in direct sunlight, and even made shadow copies of paintings on glass, the shadow images eventually darkened all over. Sad. But wait.
The first permanent photoetching was an image produced in 1822 by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce.
The First image ever produced was destroyed in a later attempt to make prints from it. But he succeeded again in 1825, 3 years after the first print. In 1826 or 1827, he made the View from the Window at Le Gras, the earliest surviving photograph from nature (i.e., of the image of a real-world scene, as formed in a camera obscura by a lens.
Niépce’s camera photographs required an extremely long exposure (at least eight hours and probably several days). In partnership with Louis Daguerre, he worked out post-exposure processing methods that produced visually superior results and a more light-sensitive resin, but hours of exposure in the camera were still required. They did this with at most secrecy as they were planning to commercialize it. Who would’t right? Imagine in 2019, waiting 4–5 days to take a single picture. We would totally drop the idea after an hour. That’s exactly what technology destroyed. Patience.
Niépce died in 1833. Well People die. Can’t do anything about it. Daguerre then redirected the experiments toward the light-sensitive silver halides, which Niépce had abandoned many years earlier because of his inability to make the images he captured with them light-fast and permanent. Daguerre’s efforts culminated in what would later be named the daguerreotype process. You can read them in your own time. Very well explained on wiki.
The existence of Daguerre’s process was publicly announced, without details, on 7 January 1839. The news created an international sensation. France soon agreed to pay Daguerre a pension in exchange for the right to present his invention to the world as the gift of France, which occurred when complete working instructions were unveiled on 19 August 1839. What a story right? A guy works his entire life learning, experimenting and someone else gets to enjoy the invention. Human life is funny.
Simultaneously there was developments happening in Brazil and Britain which was perfecting itself on a paper and salt based idea. William Fox Talbot, (the British guy we were talking about) had succeeded in making crude but reasonably light-fast silver images on paper as early as 1834 but had kept his work secret. After reading about Daguerre’s invention in January 1839, Talbot published his hitherto secret method and set about improving on it. At first, like other pre-daguerreotype processes, Talbot’s paper-based photography typically required hours-long exposures in the camera, but in 1840 he created the calotype process, which used the chemical development of a latent image to greatly reduce the exposure needed and compete with the daguerreotype. Talbot’s process, unlike Daguerre’s, created a translucent negative which could be used to print multiple positive copies; this is the basis of most modern chemical photography up to the present day, as daguerreotypes could only be replicated by rephotographing them with a camera.
Talbot’s famous tiny paper negative of the Oriel window in Lacock Abbey, one of a number of camera photographs he made in the summer of 1835, may be the oldest camera negative in existence.
Originally, all photography was monochrome, or black-and-white. Even after color film was readily available, black-and-white photography continued to dominate for decades, due to its lower cost and its “classic” photographic look.
The first commercial camera phone was the Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210, released in Japan in May 1999. More than 100 years later. Japan baby!
History overwhelms me sometimes. How far we have come. All the people who spent their entire life on an idea without knowing it would work out or not. History didn’t just happen. It was a lot of hard work and breaking stereotypes. Salute to science and love for knowledge.
Thanks for reading!
Chao
