origins of photography
This is my first blog post, this blog was set up in view of the SMART goal which I will need to accomplish within the next 13 weeks of the first semester of my Poly education. I will doing the topic of photography as A strongly feel that this is an area which I can and I want to better myself in. In fact, I do enjoy photography.
For my first week of the SMART goal, I shall start by sharing with all the origins of photography. I feel that I won’t be able to appreciate photography as much if I have not read up on how the invention started way back in the 1800s. While researching i came across this:
“In the 16th century many artists employed a boxlike device known as a camera obscura (Latin meaning “dark room”) as an aid to depicting space with single-point perspective. This consisted of a box with a pinhole on one side and a glass screen on the other. Light coming through this pinhole projected an image onto the glass screen, where the artist could easily trace it by hand. Artists soon discovered that they could obtain an even sharper image by using a small lens in place of the pinhole. The camera obscura was used by Renaissance artists such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.
Also essential to the invention of photography was knowledge of the light sensitivity of certain materials. More than 2000 years before the invention of the camera obscura, the ancient Phoenicians knew that a certain snail, the purpura, left a yellow slime in its wake that turned purple in sunlight. In the 18th century a German anatomy professor, Johann Heinrich Schulze, observed that silver salts darkened when exposed to light. But the idea of making pictures using this phenomenon did not occur to him. That innovation required the talents of a later generation of scientists.
By 1800 a young English chemist, Thomas Wedgwood, had succeeded in producing images of leaves on leather that he had treated with silver salts. However, he could find no way to halt the darkening action of light and his leaf images eventually faded into blackness. His attempts to capture the image displayed by a camera obscura also proved unsuccessful. For the birth of photography two key discoveries were still needed: a way to combine a light-sensitive material with the camera obscura, and a way to fix, or make permanent, the resulting image.”
After reading though this short passage from a website, I was amazed that photography started so many years ago and I was very much puzzled as to how could they use the very little resources they had then to create an image? I wondered to myself as to if that photography should start 200 years ago and to what it is today, what would it be 200 years from now?”
For my first week of the SMART goal, I shall start by sharing with all the origins of photography. I feel that I won’t be able to appreciate photography as much if I have not read up on how the invention started way back in the 1800s. While researching i came across this:
“In the 16th century many artists employed a boxlike device known as a camera obscura (Latin meaning “dark room”) as an aid to depicting space with single-point perspective. This consisted of a box with a pinhole on one side and a glass screen on the other. Light coming through this pinhole projected an image onto the glass screen, where the artist could easily trace it by hand. Artists soon discovered that they could obtain an even sharper image by using a small lens in place of the pinhole. The camera obscura was used by Renaissance artists such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.
Also essential to the invention of photography was knowledge of the light sensitivity of certain materials. More than 2000 years before the invention of the camera obscura, the ancient Phoenicians knew that a certain snail, the purpura, left a yellow slime in its wake that turned purple in sunlight. In the 18th century a German anatomy professor, Johann Heinrich Schulze, observed that silver salts darkened when exposed to light. But the idea of making pictures using this phenomenon did not occur to him. That innovation required the talents of a later generation of scientists.
By 1800 a young English chemist, Thomas Wedgwood, had succeeded in producing images of leaves on leather that he had treated with silver salts. However, he could find no way to halt the darkening action of light and his leaf images eventually faded into blackness. His attempts to capture the image displayed by a camera obscura also proved unsuccessful. For the birth of photography two key discoveries were still needed: a way to combine a light-sensitive material with the camera obscura, and a way to fix, or make permanent, the resulting image.”
After reading though this short passage from a website, I was amazed that photography started so many years ago and I was very much puzzled as to how could they use the very little resources they had then to create an image? I wondered to myself as to if that photography should start 200 years ago and to what it is today, what would it be 200 years from now?”
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10:05 PM
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