Do you remember when was the last time you placed a photo on one of those thick pages inside an album using double-sided tape? Can you remember when was the last time you hanged on the wall a photo of your kids? If not, probably you will lose some of your memories in the future.
Although the invention of photography cannot be clearly dated, there is a common consensus about the fact that the first attempt to capture photographic images using a camera obscura was around 1800. It basically consisted on an empty box with a small hole on one side and some kind of light sensitive material on the other. However, the first known photography ever made is dated around 1825. Those images needed a really long exposure time in the camera, ranging from 8 hours up to several days.
Initially, photography was a substitute for painting, especially for the middle classes, who used it mostly for family portraits. Soon, some people realized about the artistic potential of that new discipline. Some others, like George Eastman saw the economic potential and Kodak forged the famous “You press the button, we do the rest”. The instant camera was born, the photography became popular and the huge business behind it started. Our shelves full of photo albums have probably something to do with Kodak´s will to sell his products.
I recently learnt about the story of one of my colleague’s great-grandfather who, being a logistics Officer for the German Army during the WW I, documented through photographs the trip of his Company to Baghdad. My colleague discovered those images almost twenty years ago in an old box, together with old letters to her great-grandmother. He was delighted telling me the look of those black and white images in a box, together with doz...
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...oft, Dropbox and Google are some of them. Probably the most impressive is Flickr, offering 1TeraByte of data for free for certain types of archives, mostly photos.
Besides the previously mentioned methods, if you are one of those who still enjoy the feeling of the paper, there are also a lot of companies offering easy and cheap photo printing. Paper, canvas, wood, aluminum or clothes are some of the options, but your images can be printed on almost any thing, ensuring that they will be more than a bunch of electronic data.
No matter what method you choose, establish a correct workflow that ensures that your photos are being protected after you take them and attach to it. Keep doing it even if it looks like a boring task, and some day you, or someone else, will be rewarded when looking at those vintage images. And, Who knows? Maybe a book will be written about you.
Tolmachev, I. (2010, March 15). A history of Photography Part 1: The Beginning. Retrieved Febraury 2014, from tuts+ Photography: http://photography.tutsplus.com/articles/a-history-of-photography-part-1-the-beginning--photo-1908
Practiced by thousands who shared no common tradition or training from the earliest days of taking photos, the first photographers were disciplined and united by no academy or guild, who considered their medium variously as a trade, a science, an art, or an entertainment, and who often were unaware of each other’s work. Exactly as it sounds photography means photo-graphing. The word photography comes from two Greek words, photo, or “light”, and graphos, or drawing and from the start of photography; the history of the aforementioned has been debated. The idea of taking pictures started some thirty-one thousand years ago when strikingly sophisticated images of bears, rhinoceroses, bison, horses and many other types of creators were painted on the walls of caves found in southern France. Former director of photography at New Yorks museum of modern art says that “The progress of photography has been more like the history of farming, with a continual stream of small discoveries leading to bigger ones, and in turn triggering more experiments, inventions, and applications while the daily work goes along uninterrupted.” ˡ
It is considered that photography only became widely available to the public when the Kodak Eastman Company introduced the box shaped Brownie Camera in 1900. (Baker, n.p.) Its features became more refined since its original placing on the market; one of the reasons why it has become considered the birth of public photography is because of the processing. Using a similar image capture system, the brownie exposed the light to a 120mm roll of film, which could be wound round, meaning six photographs could be taken before the slides needed removing. The first Brownie used a six-exposure cartridge that Kodak processed for the photographer. (Kodak.com, n.d.) Realistically, the armature photographers did not need to understand darkroom processes, they could simply use capture the subjects, and send it to be developed. The cameras were relatively affordable, targeting many different markets, which is apparent from their advertisements. Figure 2 Is an advertisement from for the Eastman Kodak Company’s Brownie Camera; It states in bold lettering “Operated by any school boy or girl” which emphasis how it was targeted for amateur use.
Photography is a form of art, the ability to capture moments that we share and experience throughout our life. Moments that we can share and show others, moments that can show the expression, emotion, and history. Photography has literally shaped how we see the world and the people in it. It has given us the opportunity to keep records of historical moments that will forever remember and it has given us the chance to show other how life varied for everyone in this world. That is what photographer Jamie Johnson shows us through her work such as Vices and Irish Travelers.
The Birth of Photography goes way back to the very early stages of it’s development, in 1565 it was found that certain silver salts turned black when open to an element, which at this time they believed to be air. It wasn’t until mid 1720’s when they discovered it was in fact light that reacted with the salts to turn them black; this led to numerous amounts of unsuccessful trials at capturing images in a lasting, photochemical form. Many scientists, amateur inventors and artists passionately pursued developing this form throughout the 29th century. A French scientist, Joseph Niepce was the man who made this process a success. He took an eight-hour exposure of what is believed to be his courtyard outside his house and created the first paper negative in 1816. It took another three years before a fixing agent was discovered for this process and the term ‘photography’ was born. It was hundreds of years till photography had reached this stage but over the next 80 years progression in photography was dramatic. Different techniques were tried and tested but most common was the black-and-white method, which dates back to the birth of photography. “In this ‘gelatin silver’ technique, a sheet of paper is coated with a mixture of white pigment and gelatin, then with a gelatin / silver-salts solution. It is exposed to light through a negative and developed in a chemical solution.” (Wheeler, 2002, p.9)
We of our generation must take responsibility to record and preserve images so that future generations can try and understand the conflict. But I feel our generation, with the ability via television or the internet to have images of conflict viewed directly into the comfort of homes, must understand that the power of war photography.
While we think of photography as a fairly modern invention, that is simply not true. In fact, there are documents on the underlying principle behind photography dating back to as early as the Fifth Century, B.C. The first recorded instance of a photographic image was found in 5th Century China. During that time, Chinese philosopher and scholar Mo-Ti described how light passing through a pinhole into a dark room created an inverted, full color image on the opposite wall. Mo-Ti the room he used to produce this phenomenon his “Collecting Place,” or “Locked Treasure Room,” referencing the fact that it collects an image, and must sealed off from light in order to function. This device will later come to be known as the “camera obscura” (latin for “dark room” due to In Greece in the 4th Century B.C., Aristotle used the same principle to view a partial solar eclipse projected onto the ground using a sieve. Later in the 10th Century, Scholar Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn al-Haitham (referred to as Alhazen for brevity’s sake) fully described the underlying principles, including multiple experiments involving five lanterns outside a darkened, pinholed room. The technology used further improved in the 16th century, when a convex lens was added to improve image quality, and a mirror was used to reflect the image onto a viewing surface, reorienting it to match reality. All of these innovations were created before the United States were founded.
The consensus is that film photography has gone into extinction with the emergence of affordable digital media. Countless comparisons have been made between the two formats to see which best duplicates the most realistic portrayal. The key component that makes a captivating image is left out when people compare only technical specifications. Photography is more than just pressing a button and shifting through a memory card to find a winner. It is about creating an image that expresses a vision at a decisive moment in time. Digital and film media each have their place in photography. However, neither one can replace the creative eye. As the great modern photographer Lisette Model once said, "Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest." She had no idea how easy exotic effects would get, and just how hard that would make it to capture beauty and truth in the same photograph (Plagens).
Liss, Andrea. Tresspassing Through Shadows: Memory Photography & The Holocaust. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
It took many decades for photography to evolve, and it is still in process. In the early stages of photography, it was only black and white. Painters and illustrators were still needed. Later, color photography still had a different feel from painting so the latter survived.
"History of photography and photojournalism.." History of photography and photojournalism.. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2013. .
Evolution of more than just a Camera? Cameras have documented many events in history that refuse to be forgotten. Some pictures capture life in a different time and captivate us into a moment that seems far away and perhaps mystical. Images can be found from WWI, WWI, and even as far back as the civil war. Not only are the horrors of war captured, but many other memorable moments as well. Many famous moments in celebrity history have also been caught on film, and leaders of our nation have also shared the same
...an take better photographs, even while daily activities. Now when people go on walks, they can bring their camera and take pictures of the beauty around them. The deer with her fawns eating the meadow grass, a bench in a park, or a picture of the orange, luminous sunset. The beauty is all around, people just have to go out and snap the picture.
Photography is a word derived from the Greek words “photos” meaning light and “graphein” meaning draw. The word was first used by John F.W Herschel in 1839. It is a method of recording images by the action of light, or related radiation, on a sensitive material (Bellis, N.D).
Digital camera is a very important tool nowadays. People would always want to save their memories in the shape of pictures that will last forever. People were amazed when the first ever camera introduced back in hundreds of years ago. At that time camera consisted of large and impractical components and it was very hard to use. In fact, it even took quite some time to develop the pictures on the paper. But now there are some products of digital camera that are very easy to use and with its pocket-sized feature, one can carry it everywhere. There are several advantages of using digital camera: very easy to use, easy to carry on, instant feedback; which means one can immediately review the captured pictures and erase any pictures that they don’t like. One real advantage of digital camera is that one can share the pictures with other people easily thanks to the high speed internet connection. Before digital camera one has to print pictures, paying for postage, and waiting for the pictures to be delivered. Gone were that days since it is possible now to share the pictures online within minutes.