Photography Firsts and Milestones
Photography, for today's citizen of the Earth, means the taking a picture of anything we see using a camera and processing it as a digital image in an electronic display such as the computer monitor or a hard copy on paper. Other surfaces also used for photographic images are glass, metal, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), etc.
The etymology of the term photography comes from the Greek words f??(photos), meaning light and ??af?(graphé), meaning illustration by means of lines or drawing. So taken together, photography means drawing with light. How poetic!
The technical definition of photography is not that easy to understand by the layman. From Wikipedia: "photography is theart, science and practice of creating pictures by recording radiation on a radiation-sensitive medium, such as a photographic film or electronic image sensors".
The history of photography is very long and hardly comprehensible to the ordinary non-technical person. Even the professional photographer does not bother to really understand it but uses photography as the medium for his artistic or commercial objectives. It will not be easy to simplify photography for the ordinary person to grasp and keep track of without falling asleep several times in the course of reading the story. Let us just pick up the more important milestones of its development and evolution.
The Milestones
1) Earliest reference to the camera:
· Pinhole camera – Between the 5th and 4th Centuries B.C. by the Chinese philosopher Mo Ti and by Aristotle and Euclid, Greek mathematicians.
· Camera obscura was used by mathematician Artemius of Tralles in his experiments circa 6th Century A.D.
2) French inventor Nicéphore Niépce produced the first permanent "photo-etching" image in 1822 which was unfortunately destroyed later in an attempt to duplicate it. He however successfully produced the first permanent photograph entitled "Window at Le Gras" which took over 10 minutes to "expose" to his camera obscura in 1826. Photographing a person was impossible since nobody can pose very still for the camera that long. Any movement will cause the person not to be captured into the image.
3) The first photograph with a human person was an "accidental shot" by Niépce's colleague, Louis Daguerre. It involved a pedestrian who stopped for a shoeshine at a Paris street long enough to be captured by an improved version of the camera in 1838.
4) The first light picture ever taken of a human person's photographic portrait was that of Robert Cornelius late in 1839.
5) The first successful colour prints appeared in the early part of the 20th Century, demonstrated by Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii's picture of a man by the brook with shades of greens singling out grass, shrubbery and trees against rocks and earth.
6) The first camera that recorded images on disc was the Sony Mavica.
7) Kodak's DCS 100 was the first commercial fully-digital single-lens reflex camera.
Later versions, with other brands keeping pace, lowered prices and made them affordable to the masses. Let's thank God for our scientists!
The etymology of the term photography comes from the Greek words f??(photos), meaning light and ??af?(graphé), meaning illustration by means of lines or drawing. So taken together, photography means drawing with light. How poetic!
The technical definition of photography is not that easy to understand by the layman. From Wikipedia: "photography is theart, science and practice of creating pictures by recording radiation on a radiation-sensitive medium, such as a photographic film or electronic image sensors".
The history of photography is very long and hardly comprehensible to the ordinary non-technical person. Even the professional photographer does not bother to really understand it but uses photography as the medium for his artistic or commercial objectives. It will not be easy to simplify photography for the ordinary person to grasp and keep track of without falling asleep several times in the course of reading the story. Let us just pick up the more important milestones of its development and evolution.
The Milestones
1) Earliest reference to the camera:
· Pinhole camera – Between the 5th and 4th Centuries B.C. by the Chinese philosopher Mo Ti and by Aristotle and Euclid, Greek mathematicians.
· Camera obscura was used by mathematician Artemius of Tralles in his experiments circa 6th Century A.D.
2) French inventor Nicéphore Niépce produced the first permanent "photo-etching" image in 1822 which was unfortunately destroyed later in an attempt to duplicate it. He however successfully produced the first permanent photograph entitled "Window at Le Gras" which took over 10 minutes to "expose" to his camera obscura in 1826. Photographing a person was impossible since nobody can pose very still for the camera that long. Any movement will cause the person not to be captured into the image.
3) The first photograph with a human person was an "accidental shot" by Niépce's colleague, Louis Daguerre. It involved a pedestrian who stopped for a shoeshine at a Paris street long enough to be captured by an improved version of the camera in 1838.
4) The first light picture ever taken of a human person's photographic portrait was that of Robert Cornelius late in 1839.
5) The first successful colour prints appeared in the early part of the 20th Century, demonstrated by Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii's picture of a man by the brook with shades of greens singling out grass, shrubbery and trees against rocks and earth.
6) The first camera that recorded images on disc was the Sony Mavica.
7) Kodak's DCS 100 was the first commercial fully-digital single-lens reflex camera.
Later versions, with other brands keeping pace, lowered prices and made them affordable to the masses. Let's thank God for our scientists!
