Photography is the art, application, and practice of creating s by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is employed in many fields of science, manufacturing (e.g., photolithography), and business, as well as its more direct uses for art, film and video production, recreational purposes, hobby, and mass communication. A person who operates a camera to capture or take photographs is called a photographer, while the captured image, also known as a photograph, is the result produced by the camera.
Typically, a lens is used to focus the light reflected or emitted from objects into a real image on the light-sensitive surface inside a camera during a timed exposure. With an electronic image sensor, this produces an electrical charge at each pixel, which is electronically processed and stored in a digital image file for subsequent display or processing. The result with photographic emulsion is an invisible latent image, which is later chemically developed into a visible image, either negative or positive, depending on the purpose of the photographic material and the method of processing. A negative image on film is traditionally used to photographically create a positive image on a paper base, known as a print, either by using an enlarger or by contact printing.
Before the emergence of digital photography, photographs that utilized film had to be developed to produce negatives or projectable slides, and negatives had to be printed as positive images, usually in enlarged form. This was typically done by photographic laboratories, but many amateur photographers, students, and photographic artists did their own processing.
Etymology The word "photography" was created from the Greek roots (), genitive of (), "light"φάος , Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus and () "representation by means of lines" or "drawing", together meaning "drawing with light".
Several people may have coined the same new term from these roots independently. Hércules Florence, a French painter and inventor living in Campinas, Brazil, used the French form of the word, , in private notes which a Brazilian historian believes were written in 1834. This claim is widely reported but is not yet largely recognized internationally. The first use of the word by Florence became widely known after the research of Boris Kossoy in 1980.
On 25 February 1839, the German newspaper published an article titled , discussing several priority claims, especially that of Henry Fox Talbot's, in relation to Daguerre's claim of invention. The article is the earliest known occurrence of the word in public print. It was signed "J.M.", believed to have been Berlin astronomer Johann von Maedler. The astronomer John Herschel is also credited with coining the word, independent of Talbot, in 1839.
The inventors Nicéphore Niépce, Talbot, and Louis Daguerre seem not to have known or used the word "photography", but referred to their processes as "Heliography" (Niépce), "Photogenic Drawing"/"Talbotype"/"Calotype" (Talbot), and "Daguerreotype" (Daguerre).
History
Precursor technologies
Photography is the result of combining several technical discoveries relating to seeing an image and capturing the image. The discovery of the camera obscura ("dark chamber" in Latin) that provides an image of a scene dates back to ancient China. Greek mathematicians Aristotle and Euclid independently described a camera obscura in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE.Campbell, Jan (2005) Film and cinema spectatorship: melodrama and mimesis . Polity. p. 114. In the 6th century CE, Byzantine mathematician Anthemius of Tralles used a type of camera obscura in his experiments.Crombie, Alistair Cameron (1990) Science, optics, and music in medieval and early modern thought. A&C Black. p. 205.
The Arab physicist Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) (965–1040) also invented a camera obscura as well as the first true pinhole camera. The invention of the camera has been traced back to the work of Ibn al-Haytham. While the effects of a single light passing through a pinhole had been described earlier, Ibn al-Haytham gave the first correct analysis of the camera obscura, including the first geometrical and quantitative descriptions of the phenomenon, and was the first to use a screen in a dark room so that an image from one side of a hole in the surface could be projected onto a screen on the other side. He also first understood the relationship between the focal point and the pinhole, and performed early experiments with afterimages, laying the foundations for the invention of photography in the 19th century.
Leonardo da Vinci mentions natural camerae obscurae that are formed by dark caves on the edge of a sunlit valley. A hole in the cave wall will act as a pinhole camera and project a laterally reversed, upside down image on a piece of paper. Renaissance painters used the camera obscura which, in fact, gives the optical rendering in color that dominates Western art. It is a box with a small hole in one side, which allows specific light rays to enter, projecting an inverted image onto a viewing screen or paper.
The birth of photography was then concerned with inventing means to capture and keep the image produced by the camera obscura. Albertus Magnus (1193–1280) discovered silver nitrate, and Georg Fabricius (1516–1571) discovered silver chloride.Potonniée, Georges (1973). The history of the discovery of photography. Arno Press. p. 50.
Daniele Barbaro described a diaphragm in 1566.Gernsheim, Helmut (1986). A concise history of photography . Courier Dover Publications. pp. 3–4. Wilhelm Homberg described how light darkened some chemicals (photochemical effect) in 1694.Gernsheim, Helmut and Gernsheim, Alison (1955) The history of photography from the earliest use of the camera obscura in the eleventh century up to 1914. Oxford University Press. p. 20. Around 1717, Johann Heinrich Schulze used a light-sensitive slurry to capture images of cut-out letters on a bottle and on that basis many German sources and some international ones credit Schulze as the inventor of photography.Litchfield, Richard Buckley (1903). Tom Wedgwood, the First Photographer, etc., London, Duckworth and Co. Out of copyright and available free at archive.org. In Appendix A (pp. 217–227), Litchfield evaluates assertions that Schulze's experiments should be called photography and includes a complete English translation (from the original Latin) of Schulze's 1719 account of them as reprinted in 1727. The fiction book Giphantie, published in 1760, by French author Tiphaigne de la Roche, described what can be interpreted as photography.
In June 1802, 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, it was reported in 1802 that "the images formed by means of a camera obscura have been found too faint to produce, in any moderate time, an effect upon the nitrate of silver." The shadow images eventually darkened all over.Litchfield, R. 1903. "Tom Wedgwood, the First Photographer: An Account of His Life." London, Duckworth and Co. See Chapter XIII. Includes the complete text of Humphry Davy's 1802 paper, which is the only known contemporary record of Wedgwood's experiments. (Retrieved 7 May 2013 via archive.org ).
Invention
The first permanent photoetching was an image produced in 1822 by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce, but it was destroyed in a later attempt to make prints from it. Niépce was successful again in 1825. In 1826 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).
Because Niépce's camera photographs required an extremely long exposure (at least eight hours and probably several days), he sought to greatly improve his bitumen process or replace it with one that was more practical. In partnership with Louis Daguerre, he worked out post-exposure processing methods that produced visually superior results and replaced the bitumen with a more light-sensitive resin, but hours of exposure in the camera were still required. With an eye to eventual commercial exploitation, the partners opted for total secrecy.
Niépce died in 1833 and 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. The essential elements—a silver-plated surface sensitized by iodine vapor, developed by mercury vapor, and "fixed" with hot saturated salt water—were in place in 1837. The required exposure time was measured in minutes instead of hours. Daguerre took the earliest confirmed photograph of a person in 1838 while capturing a view of a Paris street: unlike the other pedestrian and horse-drawn traffic on the busy boulevard, which appears deserted, one man having his boots polished stood sufficiently still throughout the several-minutes-long exposure to be visible. 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. In that same year, American photographer Robert Cornelius is credited with taking the earliest surviving photographic self-portrait. Moreover, Daguerre informed the Academy of Science in Paris on 7 January 1840 of the invention.
In Brazil, Hercules Florence had started working out a silver-salt-based paper process in 1832, later naming it photographia, at least four years before John Herschel coined the English word photography. In 1834, having settled on silver nitrate on paper, a combination which had been the subject of experiments by Thomas Wedgwood around the year 1800, Florence's notebooks indicate that he eventually succeeded in creating light-fast, durable images. Partly because he never published his invention adequately, partly because he was an obscure inventor living in a remote and undeveloped province, Hércules Florence died, in Brazil, unrecognized internationally as one of the inventors of photography during his lifetime.