Chapter 3

History of Photography
After going through this chapter you will be able to:

i. Explain the origin of photography.

ii. Mention some pioneers that worked on photography and their
specific roles.
iii. Briefly highlight the history of colour film photography.
iv. Highlight the history of digital photography.
v. State brief history of camera obscura

1. 965: Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham identified the

principles that underpin photography when he built what could
amount to the first camera obscura on record.
2. 1774: Tiphaigne de la Roche who lived between 1729 and
1774, who wrote a novel called Giphantie where he predicted
that it was possible to capture images from nature by using a
sticky substance coated canvas.
3. 1839: Sir John Herschel invented a photographic process
using sensitized paper, coined the word "Photography" and
other terms like positive and negative. As an accomplished
chemist, he discovered the action of hyposulfite of soda on
otherwise insoluble silver salts in 1819, which led to the use of
"hypo" as a fixing agent in photography.
4. In the sixteen hundreds Robert Boyle discovered that silver
chloride turned dark when exposed to the sun, but he did not
know this was done by light. He thought it was the action of
the sun.
5. Angelo Sala who noticed that powdered nitrate of silver is
blackened by the sun.
6. 1727: Johann Heinrich Schulze discovered that certain
liquids change colour when exposed to light.
7. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Thomas
Wedgwood conducted an experiment where he captured on
some surfaces but his images could not survive as there was no
known method of making them permanent.
8. Around June/July 1827, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used
material that hardened on exposure to light to make the first
successful picture. The picture was actually what was now
known as a negative. Another problem with this picture is that
 it required an exposure time of eight hours. Also he was unable
to stop the darkening of the photograph upon further exposure
to light.
9. In 1829: Niépce went into partnership with Louis Daguerre.
Two of them worked together on photography but Niépce died
four years later. Daguerre as continued to carry out more
experiment on photography and he discovered a way of
developing photographic plates. That process reduced the
exposure time from eight hours to 30 minutes. He also
discovered that an image could be made permanent by
immersing it in salt. He named it the Daguerreotype.
10. In 1839: Paul Delaroche, a leading scholar of the day,
gave a report Daguerreotype and the French government
bought the rights to it in July 1839. Details of the process were
made public on 19 August 1839.
11.

Enhanced version of Niépce's View from the Window at Le Gras (1826 or 1827). The first
known Photograph.

The problem with Daguerreotype process:

i. it is expensive,
ii. it is fragile,
iii. It is laterally inverted
iv. each picture was a onetime affair. This means that portrait
could not be duplicated.
12. Then there was a different and a rival to the
Daguerreotype which was the Calotype invented by William
Henry Fox Talbot, which was to provide the answer to that
problem of duplication.
At the time the sensitivity of the process was extremely poor. Then,
in September 1840 Fox Talbot discovered the phenomenon of the
latent image. It is said that this was a chance discovery, when he
attempted to re-sensitise some paper which had failed to work in
previous experiments; as the chemical was applied, an image,
previously invisible, began to appear. This was a major breakthrough
which led to drastically lowered exposure times - from one hour or
between 1-3 minutes. He called the improved version the calotype
(from the Greek "Kalos", meaning beautiful) and on 31 January he
gave a paper to the Royal Society of London. The paper was entitled
"Some account of the Art of Photogenic drawing, or the process by
which natural objects may be made to delineate themselves without
the aid of the artist's pencil." Talbot patented his invention on 8
February 1841, an act which considerably arrested the development
of photography at the time. The patent (a separate one being taken
out for France) applied to England and Wales. Talbot chose not to
extend his patent to Scotland, and this paved the way for some
outstanding photographs to be produced in Edinburgh by Hill and
Adamson.
In 1844 Talbot began issuing a book entitled "The Pencil of Nature",
the first commercial book to be illustrated with actual photographs.
In order to produce these prints, he helped his former valet, Nicolaas
Henneman to set up the Reading Establishment, a photographic
processing studio within relatively easy reach of both London and
Lacock. This however lasted only four years, as it was not a financial
success.
Talbot's process in general never reached the popularity of the
daguerreotype process, partly because the latter produced such
amazing detail, but partly because Talbot asked so much for the
rights to use his process. However by 1840, Talbot had made some
significant improvements, and by 1844 he was able to bring out a
photographically illustrated book entitled "The Pencil of nature."
Compared with Daguerreotypes the quality of the early Calotypes
was somewhat inferior. However, the great advantage of Talbot's
method was that an unlimited number of positive prints could be
made from the negative. Today's film photography is based on the
same principle.
Talbot's photography was on paper, and the imperfections of the
paper were printed alongside with the image, when a positive was
made. He did much experiment to make glass the base of the film.
But the shiny and smooth surface of glass was a problem. In 1848 a
cousin of Nicephore Niépce, Abel Niépce de Saint-Victor,
perfected a process of coating a glass plate with white of egg
sensitised with potassium iodide, and washed with an acid solution of
silver nitrate. This new albumen process made for very fine detail
and much higher quality. However, it was very slow, hence the fact
that photographs produced on this substance were architecture and
landscapes; portraiture was simply not possible.
In 1851 a new era in photography was introduced by Frederick
Scott Archer, who introduced the Collodion process. This process
was much faster than conventional methods, reducing exposure
times to two or three seconds, thus opening up new horizons in
photography. Prices for daguerreotypes varied, but in general would
cost about a one pound, which would be the weekly wage for many
workers. The collodion process, however, was much cheaper; prints
could be made for as little as one shilling. A further impetus was
given to photography for the masses by the introduction of carte-
de-visite photographs by Andre Disdéri. This developed into a
mania, though it was relatively short-lived. The collodion process
required that the coating, exposure and development of the image
should be done whilst the plate was still wet. Another process
developed by Archer was named the Ambrotype, which was a
direct positive. The wet collodion process which required a
considerable amount of equipment on location. There were various
attempts to preserve exposed plates in wet collodion, for
development at a more convenient time and place, but these
preservatives lessened the sensitivity of the material. It was clear,
then, that a dry method was required. It is likely that the difficulties
of the process hastened the search for instantaneous photography.
The next major step forward came in 1871, when Dr. Richard
Maddox discovered a way of using Gelatin which had been
discovered only a few years before instead of glass as a basis for the
photographic plate. This led to the development of the dry plate
process. Dry plates could be developed much more quickly than with
any previous technique. Initially it was very insensitive compared
with existing processes, but it was refined to the extent that the idea
of factory-made photographic material was now becoming possible.
The introduction of the dry-plate process marked a turning point. No
longer did one need the cumbersome wet-plates; no longer was a
darkroom tent needed.
Celluloid had been invented in the early eighteen-sixties, and John
Carbutt persuaded a manufacturer to produce very thin celluloid as
a backing for sensitive material. George Eastman is particularly
remembered for introducing flexible film in 1884. Four years later he
introduced the box camera. With this photography could now reach a
much greater number of people.
Other names of significance include Herman Vogel, who developed
a means whereby film could become sensitive to green light and
Eadweard Muybridge who paved the way for motion picture
photography.
Camera Obscura

Camera obscura means darkened room from two Latin words

‘camera’ and ‘obscura’ which mean room and darkened/dark
respectively. Before the era of the Greek Philosopher Aristotle who
lived about 300 years BC, people from the Stone Age must have seen
and used images formed by dark rooms. But the first record of the
camera obscura principle goes back to Ancient Greece, when
Aristotle noticed how light passing through a small hole into a
darkened room produces an image on the wall opposite, during a
partial eclipse of the sun. Some history books credit the artist
Leonardo DaVinci with its invention in the 1500’s. It’s inventor is less
important than the actual use.
In the 10th century the Arab scholar Ibn al Hait[h]em (or
Alhazen, who lived about 956-1038) used the camera obscura to
demonstrate how light travels in straight lines. In the 13th Century,
the camera obscura was used by astronomers to view the sun. In the
16th Century, camera obscuras became an invaluable aid to artists
who used them to create drawings with perfect perspective and
accurate detail. Portable camera obscuras were made for this
purpose. In Victorian times, much larger public camera obscuras
became popular seaside attractions, where spying on courting
couples became a popular pastime. Today, it is used to spy on
visitors and locals alike as they make their way around our big cities.
The replacement of the pinhole with a converging lens was first
described by the Venetian, Daniel Barbaro, in 1568. He suggested
that the image would be improved by covering it with a disk having a
small hole in the center, a very early reference to using a lens to
increase the depth of focus. Camera Obscura paved the way for
images to be focused onto materials such as paper, metal or glass
that were coated with light-sensitive materials. The principle that
was later used in photography.

A simple camera obscura from 19th century.

Colour Film Photography

Beginnings in the 1840s people have started to experiment with

colour photographs. Edmond Becquerelas demonstrated an
experiment around 1848. He had to expose it for hours or days for
images to be recorded. The captured colors were so light-sensitive
and bear very brief inspection in dim light. In 1861 Thomas Sutton
took the first durable colour picture by super imposing three different
black and white pictures he took with three different filters of similar
sizes. The filters are red, green and blue. That method was proposed
by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1855. The
photographic emulsions then in use were insensitive to most of the
spectrum, so the result was very imperfect and the demonstration
was soon forgotten.
Gabriel Lippmann later worked to invent a method for
reproducing colors by photography. He used what is known as
interference phenomenon. This earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics
for 1908.
The three-color method that was suggested by James Clerk
Maxwell became the foundation of virtually all practical color
processes whether chemical or electronic. It is based on the Young-
Helmholtz theory that the normal human eye sees color because
with its inner surface that is covered with millions of intermingled
cone cells of three types. In theory, one type is most sensitive to the
end of the spectrum we call "red", another is more sensitive to the
middle or "green" region, and a third which is most strongly
stimulated by "blue".
Before 1941 processing of colour photographs was
cumbersome because films were being sent to the laboratories for
processing and printing. In 1941 researchers at Kodak Film made a
single film that was designed to be processed into a negative image
by complementary colors. The use of such a negative for making
prints on paper simplified the processing of the prints and reduced
cost. Instant color film was introduced by Polaroid in 1963. This made
wait and get colour photography possible.
By 1970, prices of colour photo production were coming down.
This is because film sensitivity had been improved, electronic flash
units had replaced flash bulbs, and in most families color had
become the norm for snapshot-taking. Black-and-white film
continued to be used by some photographers who preferred it for
aesthetic reasons or who wanted to take pictures by existing light in
low-light conditions, which was still difficult to do with color film. It
was possible for photographers to do their own developing and
printing. By 1980, black-and-white film in the formats used by typical
snapshot cameras, as well as commercial developing and printing
service for it, had nearly disappeared in the US. By the 1990s colour
photographs have completely replaced Black-and-White photos in
Nigeria.

Digital Photography

The first recorded attempt at building a digital camera was in

1975 by Steven Sasson who is an engineer at Eastman Kodak. He
used solid-state CCD (charge-coupled device, a high-speed
semiconductor) image sensor chips developed which was developed
by Fairchild Semiconductor in 1973. The camera he used was
heavy. It is almost 3.6 kg. It was used to record black and white
images to a cassette tape, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixels and it
took 23 seconds to capture its first image in December 1975. That
was a prototype camera for technical exercise, and not intended for
mass production. The first true digital camera that recorded images
as a computerized file was likely the Fuji DS-1P of 1988, which
recorded to a 16 MB internal memory card that used a battery to
keep the data in memory. This camera was never marketed
internationally, and has not been confirmed to have shipped even in
Japan. The first commercially available digital camera was the
1990 Dycam Model 1. It was sold as the Logitech Fotoman. It used
a CCD image sensor, stored pictures digitally, and connected directly
to a computer for downloading images.
Digital camera sales continued to flourish because of technology
advances. The digital market was divided into different categories,
Compact Digital Still Cameras, Bridge Cameras, Mirrorless Compacts
and Digital SLRs. One of the major technology advances was the
development of CMOS sensors, which helped drive sensor costs low
enough to enable the widespread adoption of camera phones. From
around 2005, camera phones have become abundant that almost
everybody can now take pictures with ease in Nigeria. This is a threat
to the work of photographers.
Evaluation
1. Mention four majour persons that worked on the development
of photography
2. Briefly state the history of colour film photography
3. What is Daguerreotype?
4. How did digital photograph come?
5. What effect does digital photography have on photography?