fotolotti Pictures bring us closer

The camera obscura was first invented long before film and many years before John Herschel coined the word "photography" in 1839.

No one is sure who invented the camera obscura, the forerunner of the camera as we know it. The camera obscura was at first a room-sized compartment that had an aperture, a hole, facing a scene outside that an artist, stationed inside the dark compartment, wished to sketch or paint. The hole, if small enough, acted much like a modern camera lens, in that it projected the scene against the back wall of the compartment, quite dimly and upside down and reversed right to left. This image was smaller than the actual scene. The upside down image could best be seen if a white paper or other light color material, within the compartment, intercepted the projected image. The smaller the aperture, the sharper but dimmer the image became.

Leonardo de Vinci may have been the first to describe the principle of the camera obscura. He did so before he died in 1519. He may have invented it, or he may have only been reporting on a previously invented device. Artists used the camera obscura as an aid to sketch a scene, and would add to the scene or detract from it to produce a work of art. It was a device that might have aided a master artist in completing his masterpiece of a painting. We must not berate him for what we might consider cheating, by using an artificial device to help produce his work of art. The camera obscura was simply an aid, as were his brushes and special pigments.

Later the camera obscura was miniaturized also, made into a portable box, so it could be easily taken to new scenes. It became the “pin hole” camera when imaging materials became available. By the latter half of the 16th century, a crude convex lens replaced the pin hole. The lens admitted more light, making the image in the camera obscura brighter.

As early as 1724 Johanne Heinrich Schultz discovered that a mixture of chalk and silver would record a simple silhouette image. It took another century of experimenting before someone discovered a means to make light sensitive imaging materials, enabling the camera obscura to by-pass the artist by making direct photographs of a scene…and thus the camera was born. In 1826 Joseph Nicephore Niepce built on Schultz’s chalk and silver mixture to produce the first permanent photograph. Soon, in 1835 both Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre simultaneously worked on a system of treating silver plated copper with iodine to obtain a silver iodide photosensitive surface which would record a mirror positive image when it was exposed in a camera and developed with mercury vapor. Daguerre patented the process which took the name Daguerreotype, thus freezing out Talbot. But, on the year of Louis Daguerre’s death in 1851 Fox Talbot produced the wet collodian process. That process, with its advantages, soon replaced the Daguerreotype. The wet collodian process made glass plate negatives, which resulted in sharper non-mirror images from which copies could easily be made, unlike the non-reproducible Daguerreotype.

Direct photographs drove the market, and they started a flurry of experimentation and invention. Newer imaging materials were quickly found and lenses became more complex. Lenses were upgraded to eliminate the chromatic aberration that focused different colors at different points in front of or behind the plate image, which made the image appear out of focus. Spherical aberration, which caused vertical and horizontal lines to appear curved, was also cured by these new lenses. With new lenses pictures became sharper and less distorted.

New photo sensitive materials were found, faster and with grays more acceptable to the eye in representing color. New methods of developing were found, to bring out the latent images produced on the plate and new fixers to make the image more permanent.

I learned and verified much of the proceeding historical data from a book, “Photography Theory and Practice” by L. P. Clerc. It has a chronology of photography covering steps in the history of photography, for the years 1802-1924.