Friday, July 20, 2012

A brief history of Photography

By Steve Campbell


Photography is a technique of making visual pictures using light, optics and chemistry, developed in the early nineteenth century. However, with the advance of digital technology the chemistry element has been replaced with digital processing. But fundamentally, photography remains about visual story telling.

Originally, the phrase Photography is derived from to Greek words that mean "drawing with light". Over the years the visual story telling of photography has conveyed historical events, evidence for scientific discovery, records of family life and news and in many circles is considered to be pieces of art. Photography is today enjoyed by huge numbers of people worldwide, both professionally and socially to capture images using light and optics.

So, what is Photography? Well, at the very heart of the photographic process is light, the primary ingredient. In both film and digital photography the photosensitive process occurs where a change occurs due to exposure to light. For film it is certain chemicals and for digital it's an electron chip array.

Film photography uses silver halide crystals and chemicals called halogens e.g. bromine or chlorine. To create a photograph the silver crystals are made into an emulsion by distributing them in gelatin to produce a thin film layer called an emulsion.

The silver halide crystals undergo changes when exposure to light. The stronger the light the more darker the area of film becomes. With further chemical processing a negative is produced that translates dark areas into light areas on the final photograph. This is known as the negative - positive process the elemental basis of all film photography.

In the early 1900 digital cameras may an appearance on the photographic scene. They originally used a CMOS, Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor, as the light sensitive chip array and images were stored in memory or on a computer. The CMOS device offered very low resolutions when compared to film and it was not until CCDs, Charged Coupled Device and advances in chip design that mega pixels devices began to offer excellent picture resolutions.

The main advantage of digital photography over film is the way digital images can be manipulated and stored using computer programs and with the advent of the Internet, sharing has become very convenient.

So, What is Photography? Well, despite the advances of digital technology there is certainly still a place in photography for the film process, particularly in black and white processing where you can be in complete control of the process from beginning to end, in the event you have your own darkroom. However, fundamentally, it's about story telling and recording events which ever method or camera type you utilize.




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