Everything has a history. Photography is no exception. It had a beginning, like everything else, and is still changing and ongoing.
So... let's start from the beginning, shall we?
> Jospeh Niepce (1765): Did you know that those digital cameras we have, which are about 2"x3"x0.5", started off as whole rooms? Yeah. Jospeh Niepce was the first person to make a true photograph. The 'camera' he used was a whole ROOM. It was a method called Camera Obscura, which was a room that had absolutely no light that can pass into it except for a small hole. It took 8 hours for it to develop!
First photograph ever. :)
> Thomas Wedgewood (1771-1805): Sometimes, you make breakthroughs and change things. Sometimes, you can inspire breakthroughs. Thomas Wedgewood spent his life exploring ways to use chemicals to fix an image photographically. Although he didn't succeed in discovering a sure way to do so, he inspired and contributed to 19th century research.
> Louis Dagurre (1787-1851): As time goes by, the camera had to change from a room to something more efficient. Louis Dagurre invented the dagguerreotype, which was a much smaller and the exposure was a lot faster. However, it still was a good 20-30 minutes, so it required a tripod and for the subjects of the photographs (mainly, the people) to stay perfectly still.
A dagguereotyope.
This was the type of photo you would get. Since the person had to stay still for 20-30 minutes, they were mostly posed portraits.
> William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877): Have you ever seen a photo or a scene that had anything white turn out black and anything black turn out white? That's called a negative. He spent his time experimenting with negative photos. If you look back a few posts, you can see the pinhole camera pictures, which turned out negative as well.
Just in case you didn't want to look back, here's another negative photo.
> Fedrick Scott Archer (1813-1869): Yet another process to improve the camera. Fedrick Scott Archer discovered the wet collodion process, which changed the exposure to just a few seconds. It also helped create positive photos.
A photograph, taken using the wet collodian processs.
> Roger Fenton (1819-1869): When you think of war photos, you would think of pictures of people fighting against both the harsh cold and the enemy troops, right? Roger Fenton was a photographer of the Crimean War, but he had a very different view than what we had. He was a government worker and was biased already, but the whole reason that he was to take pictures of the war was to show that the conditions of the soldiers weren't as bad as people thought (even though they were). So he ended up making the photos look more like a picnic than a war. All of the soldiers posed for his photos.
"War? What war?"
> Matthew Brady (1822-1896): Matthew Brady was like the opposite of Roger Fenton. He took pictures of the real stuff during the civil war. However, to keep the public from knowing too much and possibly protesting, the government bought all of his photos for a sum of $25,000.
The real stuff.
From one discovery to another, photography has been used and changed over the ages. And it will probably keep on changing. Who knows? You may be the one to change it. :)
- Rosa
